Graph Editor: Reevaluate Key and Handle Selection Behavior
Disclaimer: While not a big change on the grand scheme of things, every little tweak to the Graph Editor selection behavior breaks muscle memory for animators - who typically rely on highly trained muscle memory. So we don't take these "tweaks" lightly.
We've just streamlined selection behavior across 2D editors for click and drag actions on items (nodes, VSE strips, Dopesheet keyframes, etc.).
As relevant to this topic, the following actions should work well together:
- Click+drag on an item to select and move it in one go.
- With multiple items selected, click+drag on one moves all (previously only moved the clicked on item). We'll refer to this as drag-all-selected.
This is incompatible with the current Graph Editor selection behavior:
- You'd want to be able to click a key to unhide the curve-handles, and then just click+drag a single handle.
Issue is that currently, clicking a key to unhide the curve-handles also selects the handles. With drag-all-selected, dragging a handle would move both handles and the key.Note that this capture already includes tweaks to allow deselecting keys without that hiding the handles.
Besides this issues, we could solve further problems:
- With default settings, it's not possible to select multiple handles, without the keys. To do that you have to either:
- change the keymap so Box Select has the option Include Handles enabled and use that, or
- disable View → Only Selected Keyframes Handles.
- When moving multiple items (e.g. through G), left and right handles are moved together. Usually you'd want only one side to move (or one side + the neighbour handle on the curve if selected).
There's intentionally no proposal in this description yet.
