Marquee selection similar to other CAD packages (left to right vs. right to left).

[ruevs]

System information

• SolveSpace version: 0d26ca1
• Operating system: all

Expected behavior

phkahler commented Sep 24, 2023

Some tools will select anything overlapping the box if you draw the box left-to-right and only things completely inside the box when drawn right-to-left.

I thought solvespace was trying to do this but maybe not. Maybe it should. ;-)

ruevs commented Sep 25, 2023 •

Interesting! I never knew this existed - in any software.

This could be a pretty useful "power user" feature. I wonder how widespread it is? Apparently AutoCAD uses it https://forum.vectorworks.net/index.php?/topic/42974-marquee-select-like-autocad/ and it seems Adobe Illustrator does not :-) https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/31863601-select-inside-marquee-window

And an example of the behaviour on the web
https://playground.babylonjs.com/#QHHXSD#1 (https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/marquee-selection-demo/16665)

Actual behavior

The "direction" of marquee selection does not matter.

Additional information

SolveSpace marquee selection used to be "imprecise" - any object whose Axis Aligned Bounding Box (AABB) intersected the marquee was selected. This was fixed for line segments in this pull request it is merged here 0d26ca1.

Also possibly improve the performance of marquee selection on line segments: #1411 (comment)

The marquee selection behaviour discussion started here #1374 (comment) .

[Not4sure]

This could also help users to overcome issues with current marquee selection behavior which still is "imprecise" for all except line segments.
I made quick'n'dirty implementation to illustrate this.

I can make a PR but not sure if it would be better to solve current marquee issues first.

[ruevs]

For this to work in a non-confusing manner it would be better if it found precise intersections with anything - arcs, circles, splines (text).

But you can always open a "Work In Progress" pull request if you want. This way your work will be visible and people can comment and maybe even contribute.

Edit: @Not4sure thinking about it some more - even as it is in your animated gif it is an improvement. Make a pull request.