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Lately I have been finding myself making a selection and then single clicking individual items in that selection to deselect undesired items, this can be tedious.

Currently in PureRef, it is possible to quickly select number of items by holding a modifier key down and click dragging a rectangle. This is a really good feature but its missing its opposite, which is often found in other software's; click drag a rectangle over parts of a active selection to deselect those items.

Also, with rectangle selections/deselections it becomes possible to build complex selections quickly, this is especially usefull in heavy scenes, where items are overlapping one another.

Thanks for the suggestion! Do you mean that you would like continuous select to just invert as shift click does? The reasoning that it doesn't currently is that you would have to be really careful when adding to the selection so that you don't accidentally touch already selected items. Or to add a completely new command for just deselect? Do you know of any specific software that implements it in a good way that we can look at?

Yes, I mean to add a completely separate command that would complement the existing 'continuous select' command, so that they can be used in tandem; to select or deselect items from a active selection.

Many 3D/VFX software's do this well. The following example is from maya. The first rectangle selection is used to select items (in Maya this is shift + left click drag), the second rectangle can then be used to deselect/remove items from the active selection (in Maya, this is ctrl + left click drag).

In Maya, if the second or "deselection" rectangle (ctrl + left click drag) is dragged over items that are not already in the selection, they are simply ignored (as in, they are left deselected), in effect, it can only ever have an effect over items that already selected;
https://i.imgur.com/76oUAR4.gif47

The file browser Directory Opus is another good example, shift + click drag lets you mass select items, while ctrl + click drag lets you deselect items from the existing selection;
https://i.imgur.com/9F7A0zZ.gif

>The reasoning that it doesn't currently is that you would have to be really careful when adding to the selection so that you don't accidentally touch already selected items.

I think this is how File explorer works as well, it combines both operations into one command, so that if a rectangle falls on selected items and unselected items at the same time, it inverts their selection state. I agree this is undesirable. I think it would be much better to have to separate click drag commands, that can be bound to two separate hotkeys, one for adding to a selection, and the other for removing items from the selection.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-11-24 19:07 by netmano90.

Thank you for the detailed explanation! We'll keep it in mind as we continue to improve PureRef.

We've just released a beta version of PureRef 2.1.0 where we added a new command for this. It has no key binding by default so you'll have to set it yourself. Please give it a try and let us know if it helps!