Can Selection (Selection Menu) be smarter?

Example:
When I Ctrl+Shift click on the surface edge it should select that edge and not prompt me with a Selection Menu, 'cause it doesn’t know if I meant to select the edge or a surface itself.
If I don’t move my mouse and Ctrl+Shift click the same spot again it should select the surface or the next object under the cursor if there’s one.

I run all possible commands with pre-selected objects and an extra click every time I need to move an edge or w/e piles up to a major annoyance.

In an ideal world an option to turn it off completely would be the best. I’d prefer clicking the same spot to scroll through selection options selecting them right away (seeing what you’ve selected in the properties panel) rather than moving my mouse to the menu to select something with an extra click.

I understand, some workflows have dozens of overlapping objects where the Sel Menu would be preferable for quicker selection, but alot of them don’t and we have to deal with the annoying Sel Menu.

Hi Asterisk,

not shure it this helps but you can scroll through the selection menu by using the mouseweel when it comes up or by just left clicking on the same spot over and over. (To avoid to move the mouse over the list). Then you can click the right mouse button, enter or spacebar to accept the currently-highlighted object.

But what should happen when you CTRL+SHIFT click on the edge of eg. a cube, when 2 edges are under the mouse ?

c.

^ Yeah, I know that, but that’s still an extra click to prompt Rhino to select an object. Sometimes I’m dealing with hundreds of objects that have at least 2 sides to edit. (Like implementing field measurements for panels on a high-rise). That’s an extra couple of hundreds useless clicks.

Did you know you can scroll through selection options with a left mouse button click as well as mouse wheel? That’s cool and all, but I want my object to be selected when I click.

Also, I forgot to mention. It’d be nice to have a selection sort priority options.
Example:

  1. Annotations
  2. Curves
  3. Surfaces

So, if I Shit+Ctrl click on the text that’s over the surface and a line, I’d get text selected. If I click again, I get line selected and so on and so forth according to your priority options.

I tried to find where I can turn the Selection Menu off, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. In this regard AutoCAD’s Shift + Space to scroll through overlapping objects is superior to Rhino’s Sel Menu, but still quite “not there”.

Yes, thats what i meant with clicking on the same spot over and over.

I feel you pain :wink: If that selection is not an edge (a subobject) but a regular object, i´ve got used to just click on spots on the object where i´m shure no selection menu comes up. eg. in shade mode, i click on the shaded area only.

The priority options would be helpful, options to exclude objects from the (sub) selection menu too.

it has been asked and answered in the old newsgroup, but i cannot find it. I´m almost shure it exists.

c.

^ Glad to hear I’m not alone “suffering” here. XD

I think that when a user sub-picks using CTRL+SHIFT to make a sub-object selection, the parent object should not be part of the selection menu. But this is a personal I preference.

I remember some old test commands, TestPickSub and TestSubSelect. The first allowed to control various filters to choose from using subselection, eg. only edges. Unfortunately, this command still works but it`s not to select, just for testing purposes.

c.

I don’t get an option for a surface when shift-clicking a surface edge - is that what is happening for you?
Shift-clicking a polysurface edge does bring up the adjacent surfaces in the selection menu.

What if the filter menu had another option of ‘Edges’, so if surfaces and polysurfaces were unticked, only edges would select when shift-clicking? I know this isn’t what you’re asking for, but trying to come up with a possibly simpler change that might help.

Also, in your current case, if the panels are just simple planes, could turning on points for the surfaces (or SolidPtOn for polysurfaces) and using the filter menu with only control points selected, save you clicks?

Yes, but this only happens when objects are grouped, eg. group two boxes, then CTRL+SHIFT click on one of the box edges. The box is a subobject itself.

c.

Groups were never mentioned, so didn’t think they were being used here. Ungrouping or my suggestions above still might help then…

I like the idea on sub-selection filters and they could be separate from the existing filter options. To clarify more I might have all my filters turned on but when I go into sub-selection I can set a separate set of selection features, like edges or extrusions.

One other thing I think would be nice are commands to control the selection filter. For example SelPts will select all visible points in your workspace but if I were to say “FilterPts” I could chose the group of points I want to select and I will not select any other geometry types. In my personal workflow I avoid button clicking as much as possible and this would certainly help with that.

I didn’t realize that grouping was causing the Sel Menu to pop up hence the reason of not mentioning it. I’ll post a short vid of my workflow tomorrow. Maybe I’m just not doing something the “right” way.

That is something that could be improved somehow, believe it’s been brought up at some point - that control-shift acts as both an object within a group and a sub-object selector at the same time. Most of the time that’s fine for me, but there are definitely cases where I wish they were separated.

@Norsemen23 I like the FilterPts command - acts as a one-shot filter, I’d guess that would be scriptable, too, in the meantime.

Hi Andrew - you can (if I follow) kind of do this now with aliases -

 NoEcho ~_-SelectionFilter ShowDialog=Yes  Curves=No Surfaces=No  Polysurfaces=No  Meshes=No Annotations=No  Lights=No Blocks=No  **Points=Yes**  ControlPoints=No  PointClouds=No  Hatches=No  Others=No  DisableFilter=No Enter

The problem is, it is not a one-shot so the previous settings are not restored. I’ll see if there is more that we can do- for example, currently filters are not active if the dialog is not open- safety device - but it would make sense, I think, to allow the dash version of the command with ShowDialog=No to activate the filter as a one-shot.

On the other hand, as Mikko just reminded me, there are a lot of one-shots already, even if they do not behave identically in all cases to the filter box filters…
crv
pt
srf
mesh

for example can be used at the command line to filter selection for one pick.

-Pascal

I forgot about that type of one-shot, very helpful, but only once a command has been activated, correct? crv does work to select edges then, though.

@Asterisk Also check if shift-ctrl (+alt if object under cursor start point) with a left to right window selection over the whole edge, but not other entire objects, can help.

Correct- use when Rhino is asking for a selection. You can test using the Select command.

-Pascal

It should select the edge closest to your face.

Did I mention I hate selection menu?

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One question : What is the use of : NoEcho ?

It stops the printing of all the intermediate options in the command to the command line.

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Oh thanks !