Deselecting object & linked mesh - why it is so awful?

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Once a year I’m thinking about why deselecting is so badly designed and why no one is talking about to change it?

If I want to select multiple objects I press Shift and click, if I want to deselect I’ve must to click again twice - because first click is setting to active and second is deselect - but when there’s multiple objects, one on another it is impossible to deselect because it only switch between active and selected objects. Why there’s not a option to deselect without changing active object? For example, Alt + Click for deselecting?

Similar situation we have in selecting linked mesh/element in Edit Mode - besides that there’s not a mode for selecting border or element (but in UV there is selecting whole island as 4th mode!) the only way to deselect is pressing L on mesh and clicking “Deselect”, everytime! Can’t we have the new selection mode for element/linked mesh?

I love the concept with active object/mesh but it is tedious with simple, most used things like selecting and deselecting. Other example is selecting border with double Alt - it not possible to select multiple border because it is changing between active/selected mesh. Am I missing something?

#2

They are talking about it. There’s a whole design discussion about augmenting the “active” concept. That said, selection in object mode is a bit of a separate topic and indeed it could stand some improvement.

In edit mode, that way is not the only way. In default mapping Shift+L should be bound to linked deselection.

Regarding the double loop selection to select border, that’s a side effect of the Shift+Alt binding set to Toggle, and there’s really no good way around it if you want to keep the other bindings intact. E.g. you could amend that binding to do Extend instead of Toggle, but then deselection would be lost. Ctrl+Alt is occupied. Maybe you could add a Ctrl+Shift+Alt binding for deselection though that’s a handful.

The double select to select border was a kind of ad-hoc decision which is somewhat decent for selection only, not so much for toggling or deselection. These things tend to happen when developers aren’t users. It would’ve been indeed much better if we just had dedicated selection mode for borders or pre-set selection constraints.

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