Selection modifier shortcuts are confusing

[mirkea]

I go in to do a simple operation: merging some rectangular selections.

Draw the first selection, then start drawing the second

Using Ctrl, Shift or Alt didn't seem to work. I look at the tooltips and it says "Drag + RightMouse".

 

What? Never before have I seen this combination, I had to do 2 attempts to get it right since my brain was still stuck in the "wait? what? " phase

 

Consistency is golden. Ctrl, Alt and Shift have been used as modifiers for over a decade, having this new and unintuitive selection coming out of nowhere is confusing.

 

I get that you might more than those 3 selectors but that's why you can combine the modifiers (ctrl + shift, ctrl + alt + shift etc).

[Chris B]

Hey mirkea,

I'll pass your feedback over to development as I agree with you. My natural reaction is to release the right mouse button first which causes your original selection to be lost in place of the one being currently dragged and I find myself having to stop and think about what I'm doing.

There have been a few discussions on the use of the right mouse button being used in other areas too. Thanks.

[mirkea]

Hi Chris. Thanks for the understanding.

 

I would pass it on to the development team that using the right mouse buttons for stuff that is not usually used for (context menus for example) can lead to unintuitive functionality and frustrations. One of the best thing about this up as is that it feels instantly intuitive and natural to people who used PS/AI before.

[R C-R]

I would pass it on to the development team that using the right mouse buttons for stuff that is not usually used for (context menus for example) can lead to unintuitive functionality and frustrations. One of the best thing about this up as is that it feels instantly intuitive and natural to people who used PS/AI before.

Part of this is because on Macs a right button click is used for things like popping up contextual menus, & is functionally the same as a left button click with the Control key held down. In the Mac world this may be referred to as a "control click" or a "right click" (& there have been spirited discussions about which one is correct).

 

This is because historically Macs came with a mouse with just one button (because Steve Jobs thought two buttons was an unnecessary complication) & at that time the Control key was not used for much besides terminal keyboard emulation. When apps started offering functions activated by a second button, to allow them to be used with a one button mouse, the Control key + clicking the single button was how that was implemented.

 

Even though Macs have come with two button Apple mice for many years now, without special coding a right button click & a control key + left button click still do the same thing.

 

So while consistency may be "golden," it depends in large part on the platform/OS one is most familiar with.

[mirkea]

Fair enough, Which is why that might work on Macs but it's totally counterintuitive on Windows.

[Fixx]

Modifier keys should be the same both in mac and win, only exception being CTRL (win) = CMD (mac). Shift and Alt should behave the same. Affinity has frustratingly assigned them otherwise.

[MEB]

Hi mirkea,

We are aware that the right mouse button is not very intuitive (or practical) for this and other operations.

We are looking into this and hopefully we will have a better solution later.

[R C-R]

Modifier keys should be the same both in mac and win, only exception being CTRL (win) = CMD (mac). Shift and Alt should behave the same. Affinity has frustratingly assigned them otherwise.

OK, but what should they do to resolve the conflict of the equivalency on Macs of a right button click to a control-key left button click with no such equivalency on PC's?

 

This has been the standard on Macs for almost twenty years (since OS 8 was released in 1997, back when Windows was still sorting out USB HID class driver support for Win 98) so how do you keep it consistent for users of each (or both) platforms?