Hi Marc,

> Maybe pressing shift while dragging could preserve
> the existing selection?

Possibly.... But there may be some complications with that. One thing is that it wouldn't work for dragging a duplicate with Ctrl because Ctrl+Shift is already used to trigger a window selection.

Also some people are used to holding down shift because in other programs it is required to hold down shift to do multiple selection. So I'm a bit wary of making it do special things in MoI because many people may be holding it down already, without really intending for it to trigger special behavior.

In particular the case that I'm worried about is if you hold down shift and then drag in this situation here:




So there are 3 selected circles, and now the mouse is over top of the 4th one which is unselected. Then if you hold down shift and drag on that currently unselected one, what would you expect to happen?

From what you are asking for, I guess it would cause only the other 3 already selected circles to be dragged, and the one that you actually clicked and dragged on to be ignored and remain unselected. That may be surprising for someone when the thing they actually clicked on did not get dragged at all.


Maybe some better overall solution would be some kind of manipulator widget that you could target.


- Michael