Toggle selection behavior from multiple to regular Single select

gda_cto

I would like the ability to change the selection of items behavior. I personally find the multiple selection behaviour unintuitive, frustrating and wastes a lot of time.

In almost every other computer program, the default selection of items behaviour is to select individual items until you hold the ctrl or shift key (with some minor differences in certain views).

I get that OnShape has it's own way of doing things, but I feel that those things that are different from the default behavior of most programs or even the operating system, those should be something you can change to standard behaviour, just as you made the different mouse controls user selectable.

lougallo

This is a behavior we have built into everything in Onshape and is part of our foundational ux.  At this point we are not considering a change at this time.

Ed_in_3D

PLEASE change it. At least offer a preference setting. How many people need to make this argument before you simply do it?

We don't care if it is onshape standard. You can justify it however you want but it's bad design. It is the inverse of the vast majority of other software and for those of us who have to work in any other program throughout the course of the day it simply sucks.  Most especially for those of us using different 3D modeling software.

You have a lot of users who don't care about consistency between different device types. Furthermore, with any model that has a long tree, it is simply too easy to leave something selected by accident. 

Your desire to save money with your engineering team makes life hard for the rest of us. Listen to your users. 

S1mon

I also have to say the behavior is odd, and painful to get used to. I tell myself it's to make the UX between mobile and desktop more consistent, but I'm really not sure what was going through Onshape's UX team early on.

What I can say is there are a couple things which make it tolerable:

1. The cursor has a little number next to it when you've made selections (1, 2, 3 ... up to "5+"). This is the count of selected items.
2. Use the spacebar shortcut to deselect on desktop. 

MBartlett21

S1mon said:

[...]
The cursor has a little number next to it when you've made selections (1, 2, 3 ... up to "5+") [...]

This would be nicer if it went up to as many items as you had, rather than just 5...

Andreas_Pedersen

New to OnShape, and this "Multi Select" choice is one of the toughest habits to learn, especially since it's opposite to almost all other software I've ever used. Has there been any change to the decision of making this a Preference Setting?

I'm a bit baffled by this stubbornness of "our way is the only way" instead of letting users customize it to their preferences and workflow. It's great having a default experience in mind from the UI design team, but if the user wants to change it, why not let them? It's a tool many of us have to use every single day during our work.

eugene_kozlenko

I couldn't agree with Andreas enough. For somebody that doesn't use Onshape exclusively, the always on multiselect on the desktop is by far the most disruptive thing to my flow, and is my biggest pain point with the software. I will pay money for access to a setting somewhere that lets me multi select with CTRL instead.

I understand how it could be hard to empathize on something like this if Onshape is the only CAD you drive, but to me, the multi select default is the equivalent of somebody sneaking into your house every weekend and swapping the hot and cold pipes on all of your faucets. By Saturday afternoon, you'll only get scalded a third of the time, but life would just be a lot better if this wasn't the case.