Lets fix the box/circle/lasso selection keymaps
In 2.8, they added the new box, circle and lasso tools in the toolbar. I think they're really nice and they could be a solution to the inconsistent selection keymaps of blender. Here, let me show you what I mean. imgur.com/a/uYVbuKm I made a sheet of how the selections behave under different button combinations. See?
The toolbar box (or lasso) select mode is the best one out there. Making a new selection is easy, control is subtract like it should be, shift adds and there's also an option to do an intersection with ctrl shift which is pretty cool. All the other ways of selecting behave very differently and miss some stuff.
What to do with the old selection methods then? B , C and ctrl RMB ? B could switch to the new box select tool, C could switch to the new circle select tool and ctrl RMB could be switched to alt RMB , because that would free up ctrl and shift keys for all the selection operations. I'm really happy with this solution that I came up with.
There are 2 other things related to this topic that I'd like to discuss. I don't like how W goes through the different select modes one by one. It's a slow way of changing the selection mode since you don't know what comes next and I feel afraid of pressing it accidentally. I think the feature should be removed.
Then the second thing which is probably a bug, the circle select mode radius can be changed by holding down select and scrolling with mouse wheel, but once you let go, it goes back to the original radius. I also feel like this sort of keymap isn't intuitive, but I couldn't come up with anything better as F is already used in edit mode for poly fill and mouse wheel for zooming.
Edit: it seems like everything I mentioned above can be done through user preferences keymaps except having the circle select mode start a new selection, as well as the last bug I mentioned with the circle radius. Very nice!
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With regard to circle select- I agree, more work needs to be done to make it useful. There are a handful bugs that are listed for circle select that would cover most use cases if fixed:
developer.blender.org/T58025
developer.blender.org/T57209
The radius resetting each time you activate the tool is definitely a bug- i just double checked and tested this- and other tools DO remember your settings. So you should go log this as a bug!
There is actually an operator to activate the circle selection and you can specify the radius, BUT (crucially) the operator is missing the standard "extend" and "toggle" properties.. though oddly enough it does have deselect, so it may just be an oversight.