How to set drag border selection

Hello. I don’t know if someone else already said this, but it seems not, so I want to explain how to add the border selection to the drag-left-button action. I find really useful for my modeling process.
With this settings you’ll be able to do border selection dragging left mous button, to add selection with shift key and to subtract selection with alt key.

Let’s see how.

  1. First of all, we need to change the set-cursor shortcut. Open user preferences, go to input tab and set the item as in the picture. This way you have to press ctrl-alt-LMB to move the 3d cursor.

  2. Now go down until you find Border Select. Open the item and copy the string view3D.select_border (see picture)

  3. Go to the end of the 3D view(global) list (be sure it’s 3D view(global)). Press the Add New button 3 times to create 3 new items. In each of them paste the previous string as in the picture. Then set all their options exactly as shown in the picture.

continue…

  1. Now expand the sub-list called Gesture Border. The list is common to all the items with that string, so when you edit for one item, it’s edited for all.
    In this list there are already 7 items. Open only the third and the fourth, and uncheck all the modifier keys (like Alt, CTRL etc.).
    When you did so, create 4 new items in this list, and set them as shown in the picture.

Be sure that you did everything exactly as I show you, because if you miss something you may encounter big interaction problems.

Hope you find this useful!

I you have any problem write here.
See this video to understand what you can do this way

A slight difference in how I have set up drag select
Change position 3d curser from LMB to Shift+LMB
Added the following border select shortcuts in screenshot
No other changes gives:

  • LMB drag on a mesh selects, any other previous selection is deselected
  • Shift+LMB drag on mesh extends the selection
  • LMB drag then hold down Alt deselcts (With the emulate 3 button mouse option enabled Alt+LMB drag rotates the view so you have to drag first and then hold down the Alt key)
  • LMB drag outside the mesh deslects everything

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But if you use SHIFT+LMB to set the cursor, when you try to add elements to the selection, you move the cursor too. Or am I missing something?

How do you obtain deselection of everything when you drag over nothing?

But if you use SHIFT+LMB to set the cursor, when you try to add elements to the selection, you move the cursor too. Or am I missing something?

That should have read Ctrl+Alt+LMB

How do you obtain deselection of everything when you drag over nothing?
In the keymap above LMB drag only selects what you drag over, if you drag off a mesh you select nothing so you have nothing selected, the same as deselecting everything.

So this is fairly old thread so I presume stuff has changed. At the moment none of these work as they should. I still have to start selection with B pressed and then it kind of works but also not always.

Are there any differences how one would do it nowadays? I just want to be able to select using only LMB, add to selection with either Shift/Ctrl and remove from selection in a similar way. Deselection ideally would work with just right clicking on empty space (similar to 3dsmax).

Thanks in advance!

Nothing has changed.

I was able to change my border select to a left-click-drag, then add a shift-click-drag, to deselect, using the basics of this method.

I drag-select to add to my selection or shift-drag-select to deselect elements.

I have a global left-click deselect to deselect all.

Thanks for the help.

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