KiCad copied this feature, and I was frustrated by the "inconsistent behavior" of the selection tool for years until someone finally explained it to me.

Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated.

Eventually computing is going to get to the point where it's no longer possible to learn all of the historical baggage around why things are done a certain way. For a lot of people, we're already there.

The usual UI indication for a feature like this is for the selection rectangle to be green in one mode, blue in the other. Or something along those lines.

As so many submissions around here demonstrate, though, UI design ain't what it used to be.

There's also frequently a dotted border for inclusive selection and a solid border for exclusive selection. Very subtle. Makes it easy to remember which is which if you know how roads work.

> Now it's great, but if you're going to copy features like this, please make sure to document them so that people trying to learn how to use your tool without the requisite historical perspective don't get frustrated.

Interesting. I started with AutoCAD version 1.1. This is pre-PC days. It ran on an S-100 8086 system with an 8087 math coprocessor card, a specialized graphics card, a VT-100 terminal (the real thing, not a terminal emulator running as software one a computer), 640K of RAM disk and the CP/M operating system.

The right-to-left and left-to-right selection idioms have been part of my design "DNA" for decades. I can see how this could be confusing, yet, to be frank, I don't think it is that hard to discover.

That said, yes, absolutely positively I do agree with you in that complex tools have been doing a substandard job of communicating state, commands, options, features and commands to users. On the electronics design front I use Altium Designer. Altium have done a horrible job with the latest version (21.x.x). It is hard to list the bugs the program has, the UI/UX mess they have created, the lack of discoverability and, in general, the tangled rats-nest the software has become. Much like AutoCAD, I have been using Altium for a long time. It is hard to want to support a company through annual license renewals when they clearly don't seem to care about users.

For me, by far, the best user experiences have come from Solidworks and Fusion 360. I have far more experience with SW. The program has improved with time and the UI experience is great.

> KiCad copied this feature, and I was frustrated by the "inconsistent behavior" of the selection tool for years until someone finally explained it to me.

I wonder how many people (myself included) learned of this behavior from this post...

I did. Just off to try it now

I had a drafting course as part of my ee degree. It was mostly paper and pencil drawing shapes from different perspectives but it did have an autocad component once we were supposed to know what to draw. One of the first things they taught us was this selection feature.

THANK YOU FOR THIS TIP!

Freecad does this when editing sketches at least. Kicad also does it. It's great, but very confusing for beginners.

Try ProgeCAD, a bit cheaper alternative, but not free. AutoCAD is holy grail of 2D CAD. Many cheap alternatives like ProgeCAD etc are usable but no match to the AutoCAD. AutoLISP is of added value.

If you click and hold, it becomes a free draw selection tool with the same rules!

LibreCAD does the same thing.