Hi Danny,

> only it's a two button combo and sometimes you have to look
> down at the keyboard to locate them, where the Esc key is a
> known extreme top left button that you go by feel.

Yeah but hopefully you're not routinely making selection mistakes on every single action - when it's something that you have to do only once every 10 minutes, that extra split second glance does not amount to a significant problem, as opposed to needing to do it every 5 seconds or something like that...

The problem is that having a selection filter active is going to disable a whole lot of regular selection actions from working, so I think it's something that should be convenient to clear. That's the idea for the escape key handling anyway.


> maybe appearing close by when you turn the filters on, that's one suggestion.

But where close by - there isn't a whole lot of room to put buttons in there - do you mean popping up an extra button that eats into the text area of the line?


> In turning on the filter with the Ctrl modifier does that go for
> turning it off also ?

Yup, Ctrl + click on it again will also work for turning it off, so that's another reason why putting an extra button right next to it to do the same thing would be kind of odd.

The problem with only using Ctrl+click to turn it off again is that means you have to go back to that item again before you can go ahead and do normal modeling and normal selection again. For example say you want to select all red curves - to do that you can go set a filter on style = red, then go to the Curves entry under the Types section of the scene browser (which may involve scrolling if you have a lot of styles), and using the selection control there to select curves with that other filter in effect. Then once you're done with that particular action you'll still be stuck only being able to select red things so if you want to do anything else other than that you'd need to scroll back to the red style again and unset the filter there before being able to do regular selection - the escape key shortcut would save you that last step of having to go back to your style and unset the filter manually.

This is kind of based on the idea that filters are something you set up to help you make a particular difficult one shot selection instead of something that you would leave on for an extended period of time. Maybe that's not correct and you'll want to leave them on for an extended period, let me know if that seems to be the case once you use them.

- Michael