Previous Selection Command Needs Help!

[Scott Hopkins]

Has the "previous selection" command been smoking something? It seems to have very little short-term memory. About half the time I use the "ctrl + <-" keys to try to restore a previous selection I end up with nothing there. What is up with that? The restore previous selection command needs to sober up and pay better attention! It should work at least as well as Autocad. Yes this is a small item but worthy of a quick fix nonetheless.

Looking at the Revit manual it appears that this lazy behaviour is intentional...

"Restoring Selection

If you have selected an element or multiple elements and clear the selection, you can quickly restore that selection by pressing the left arrow (<—) key on your keyboard or by right-clicking and choosing Select Previous from the context menu. This command is most useful when you have a complex selection that you accidentally cleared.

You can only restore selection only while Modify is active. If you switch to a different command, the selection is cleared."

Why have a rule that clears the previous selection once you change commands?

[dbaldacchino]

You can only restore selection only while Modify is active. If you switch to a different command, the selection is cleared."

Why have a rule that clears the previous selection once you change commands?

Couldn't agree more. Why clear a selection set and not keep it in memory until a new selection occurs?

[irwin]

Personally, I find the times I most would like to get back my previous selection are after a command fails, and in that case Select Previous doesn't do that. Probably the selection should be restored automatically -- there should be no need to Select Previous. Anyone else run into this?

[iru69]

Personally, I find the times I most would like to get back my previous selection are after a command fails, and in that case Select Previous doesn't do that.

I'm not sure what you mean by when a "command fails" (the user fails?), but at least for me, that's not typically when I look to use it. It most often happens when I select a bunch of objects and do something with them, like move them, and then I want to do something else to them, like mirror them. Or I select a bunch of objects and do something with them and don't like the results, but I want to select them again so I can try something else. Or I want to take a look at a different view before deciding whether I want to select them again to do something else, or... well there's probably about a million scenarios when using Revit to create buildings.

Not only would I like a longer memory on the select previous command, but it would be rather ingenious if you could choose a "select previous" from, let's say, the last five previous selections that had an action associated with them (even if the action was followed by an "undo").

[sfaust]

Absolutely, and it would be even better if we could just keep pressing Control <- and cycle through the last 5 or so selection sets...