Selection and Preselection

Selection means to specify one or more entities to be processed by the think3 application command. There are two ways to select entities:

Pre-selection — first select the entities and then apply the command
Post-selection — first select the command and then select the entities to which it will be applied

Preselection, available only with some commands, can be very convenient because it allows you to select any set of entities and then perform an action on them all at once. For example, you can preselect a set of entities and then apply a transformation to them.

Some commands which normally repeat (in other words, they remain active after each use, until terminated) don't repeat when used with preselected entities. For example, when you select the Delete command and then select the entities to be deleted, the command remains active after deleting those entities, so that you can select additional entities to delete. If you preselect entities and then start the Delete command, however, the command terminates as soon as the entities are deleted.

Note

In order to add successive entities to the selection set, proceed as follows:

In pre-selection: hold down the SHIFT or the CTRL keys while selecting the entities to be added to the selection set.
In post-selection: just select the new entities to be added to the selection set (no matter whether holding down the SHIFT or CTRL keys or not); any entity you select will be automatically added to it.

Both in the pre-selection and in the post-selection mode, if you use the CTRL key, you can also deselect an entity you previously selected, removing it from the current selection set.

The ESC (Escape) key during preselection enables you to clear all entities from the selection set. In addition, when an entity has been preselected, the shortcut menu displayed by right-clicking (that is, clicking the right-hand mouse button) contains only those commands that can be applied to the selected entities. What happens when you right-click is controlled by the Right-click keeps pre-selection check box in the Input category of the System Options.

If the Right-click keeps pre-selection check box is selected, wherever you click in the graphics area, the shortcut menu that will be enabled refers to the preselected entities. So, activating a shortcut menu no longer clears the entities from the current selection set.
If the Right-click keeps pre-selection check box is not selected, the entity you had selected is deselected and the shortcut menu you get is relative to the new context.

Selection and Preselection

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