Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Separate Shortcuts for "Add to Selection" and "Remove from Selection"

Anonymous
Not applicable
If you ever worked with a programm that had this feature (even Sketchup does it very well) you know what a huge simple timesaver this really is
8 REPLIES 8
Laszlo Nagy
Community Admin
Community Admin
I disagree. I think this is only a matter of what method you are used to.
In Archicad, you both add to the selection and remove from the selection using the SHIFT key. You know that if the SHIFT-clicked element is not selected, it will be added to the selection; if it is already selected, then it will be removed from the selection.
In other programs, people are used to using two different keys for the two tasks. When I am using such a program, it feels unintuitive to me.

So I am not saying one is better than the other, I am saying that if you are used to one method that is the one that will feel natural.
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Lingwisyer
Guru
Shift-click is not an issue, it is more the inconvenience of the selection marquee when trying to select multiple groups of grouped items. There is less need for it in AC when compared to a program like AutoCAD or Sketchup though since there is rarely a need to select individual lines / faces.



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Anonymous
Not applicable
I disagree as well 🙂

yes you are right many things are "getting used to" things....and i am used to it since Archicad 6.0, but still I think in a very crowded ground floor for example, this method slows me down. with separate shortcuts I could be sure, that it wont accidentally deselect one of my current selected items but adds to it, so I could work much faster and coarser.
Mike96
Advocate
I strongly support Stefhannes' wish and honestly, don't understand people who don't understand how such shortcut comparison would be convenient sometimes.
I also came here from SketchUp and I miss its selection capabilities a lot. Have been using ArchiCAD for over two years now and still can't get used to.
For me current selection behaviour is so frustrating that I created exactly the same wish a week after yours, not realizing that there was one already. So, because my wish is basically a duplicate of yours, I vote for ESSENTIAL and I would give a thousand votes if I could. Nothing in ArchiCAD irritates me as much as this - lack of treating selection as a mathematical set that you could just add or remove elements from. Now we can only REVERSE selection which makes zero sense to me.
Guys, believe me. I tried. I did my best to work out a habit but it just didn't work.
Say, I selected a bunch of elements. Now I want to extend the selection but if there are many elements in the drawing, I have a high chance of accidentally deselecting elements I already carefully selected. Then I end up adding the deselected elements back, one by one. Totally frustrating.
For me this is number one missing feature in ArchiCAD.
ArchiCAD 25

Windows 10
AlexKW
Contributor

I agree with Stefhannes as well. Its a very simple feature that can be implemented by pressing Ctrl  or something.

SVP Architectuur & Stedenbouw
CRomero
Newcomer

I couldn't agree more. It would make the workflow much simpler, in my opinion, and also..more features are always a good thing! I don't see why would anyone be against it.

In my case, there's a little "trick" that usually helps me, although only in somewhat simple cases: If I want to select a number of specific elements, in an enclosed region of my drawing, instead of having to deselect the ones I don't need, I select everything in the intended region, and then with the Find & Select tool I apply a "double negative": I set the conditions to "not" and then remove from selection, thus ending with only the elements that I need. As I said, it's probably not useful for more complicated situations, but I hope somebody finds it helpful 🙂

jl_lt
Ace

Do you mean pressing shift to add to a selection without deselecting already selected objects?? Completely agree!!!  and i also was going to post a wish about this. I thought i was missing something (unfortunately i was not).  

 

The only thing that saves it and why i dont end up missing it so much is by using a marquee in 3d along with the find command and using the "select only inside marquee" (or something like that) which works very good. But also means many aditional clicks.

 

This is one of those basic functionality things that would be nice to have.

jattt
Participant

I second this!
 It's clear to me this is very much an either/or preference where both "sides" are very convinced their solution is the best. Could the control/command deselect option be a custom setting you can set in your work environment settings if you prefer it? 

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