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Hide (or go past) all selections in the undo History when pressing Ctrl+z


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Please add a feature making undo hide (or go past) all non destructive actions in the History, just by pressing Ctrl+Z.

image.png.efdd3707f73413b4630a1e5cc8b3bf38.png

 

When I press Ctrl+Z I have no interest in going through all of those "Set current selection" and "Clear selection", that are added for every single click I happen to do in the document since the last change I made. That's not a good user experience.

There are similar requests (e.g. here), and at least one of them reported as bug but closed by a developer just saying it's by design (obviously not even considering to move it to the requests section or give it some thought). I'd say it maight very well be by design, but it's not good design if it's just taking extra time. I can very well understand that Affinity Publisher needs to store all of those selections to be able to go back in history properly, but end-users should not need to deal with the underlying programming decisions – or see the traces of them.

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Why leave the app to guess whether the user wants a layer to be selected or not? If you want to go back to the last ‘Insert’ (or whatever) you can simply click on the relevant entry in the History panel.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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1 hour ago, Andreas1974 said:

Please add a feature making undo hide (or go past) all non destructive actions in the History, just by pressing Ctrl+Z.

I frequently make a selection and then add to that selection and ... ooops! I didn't mean to add that.... 

Mac Pro (Late 2013) Mac OS 12.7.4 
Affinity Designer 2.4.0 | Affinity Photo 2.4.0 | Affinity Publisher 2.4.0 | Beta versions as they appear.

I have never mastered color management, period, so I cannot help with that.

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16 minutes ago, Alfred said:

Why leave the app to guess whether the user wants a layer to be selected or not? If you want to go back to the last ‘Insert’ (or whatever) you can simply click on the relevant entry in the History panel.

The screen shot of the History pane was just for illustration purposes.

This is my feature request and it's is primarily about being able to use the Ctrl-Z shortcut in an efficient way, just as in most other programs. My word processing software does for example not include every cursor position or text selection in it's undo history – it's not relevant, since there is no change.

You think it's a good idea to let the user decide what should be selected.... I can't tell what would be selected when I look at the history panel. It easier just to select the object again, than to find the correct selection in the history pane. I see no point in using the history panel for returning to previous selections

There would be no "guessing" from the application involved. Why would it? My suggestion is that Affinity Publisher was to back to (and including) the last change. The selection changes in between (in the history panel) do not even have to be seen by the user, unless there is something I don't grasp at all. There probably is, since you like the selection changes to be part of the undo history.

Even if I were to use the history panel, what's the sense in looking through five irrelevant entries of "set selection"? They take up a lot of space, making the relevant parts (the actual changes) harder to find.

With my request the user would just get back to the same state as before the last change. Compare with InDesign or Word.

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5 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

I frequently make a selection and then add to that selection and ... ooops! I didn't mean to add that.... 

But adding something is a change. That change would be undone with my suggestion too.

(What is extremely annoying is that I get all these entries in the history list, that involve no change at all.)

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1 hour ago, Andreas1974 said:

But adding something is a change. That change would be undone with my suggestion too.

And your suggestion would cause a problem in that scenario, as I understand it. I think @Old Bruce would only want Ctrl+Z to back up 1 entry in the History, not all of the selection entries.

-- Walt
Designer, Photo, and Publisher V1 and V2 at latest retail and beta releases
PC:
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1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

And your suggestion would cause a problem in that scenario, as I understand it. I think @Old Bruce would only want Ctrl+Z to back up 1 entry in the History, not all of the selection entries.

Oh, sorry. I thought @Old Bruce meant he was adding text or an object (writing or pasting) into his selection. But he was obviously just writing about making the selection.

Yes, in that case my suggestion would indeed remove his selection altogether and erase a letter or change back a colour or whatever real change was done to the document before.

I actually meant frame selections, i.e. just clicking on a text frame, which also results in a "set selection" in the history.

But about text selections, since that was an argument against my suggestion: I'm not sure if it works the same on Mac but pressing Shift + left and right arrow keys extend or subtract a character to/from the selection. A word at a time is selected by holding Shif+Ctrl while pressing the arrows. Shift + "home" or "end" selects up to the beginning or end of a line, shift+down and up arrows select lines. Pressing the arrow key in the opposite direction to undo the last selection addition is as quick as pressing Ctrl+Z – and works in all "normal" applications, at least in Windows. 

And what about selecting a frame... by setting focus to it, why would anyone want to get that in their Undo history? Is there a reason to it?

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