Apply change to multiple objects by default
It would be super useful to have an option in the settings that makes changes apply to all selected objects by default instead of clicking the Alt button. This would match the behaviour of any other software on earth.
Basically I imagine a toggle in the settings that inverts the behaviour of the alt button (when not clicked the change is applied to all the objects in the selection, if clicked it apply the changes only to the active object).
In my opinion this option would be well received by the community as it was the left click select by default.
4 Comments
The problem is that
Altto edit multiple objects doesn't always work, it's hard to implement it everywhere. So if this behavior becomes default, and users expect it but it doens't always work, it's more confusing.The solution would be to first make Alt work everywhere, then make it default.
I completely disagree with this. The alt command is relatively hidden and has very poor discoverability. The fact that it does not work with every situation is a separate issue.
You will never be able to make Alt work for every situation.
There's a 7 years old ticket which further explains this: #54862 - Multi-Object Properties Editing - blender - Blender Projects
Should this post (and its original duplicate ) be marked as "in progress"?
But even so, could it be considered to implement this behavior as-is even if there are scenarios where it wouldn't work (yet)? After all, the current behavior has those scenarios, and AFAIK most people accept it as is, I'm not sure their reaction would be much different by reversing the default behavior.
What is sure is that many people right now just do not even know Blender can propagate changes on a selection using ⎇ Alt or copy attributes / link data menus or fully understand how it works and find it frustrating to use, and that if we changed the default behavior as is: suddenly most people would have the behavior they expect out of the box most of the time in a very user-friendly way.
I see this as a greater gain for everyone rather than waiting any longer to fix the broken scenarios first and then changing the behavior. Not to mention that, it's been already seven years that the above ticket has been made without any advancement on it so far, and afaik there's still no timeline on this.
I totally agree with this. Maybe the option to reverse the alt behaviour could be not active by default, and there could be a warning message when you activate it saying that the reversed alt behaviour would not work everywhere. but at least in most useful scenarios would work as people expect it to work! Mahybe it could be even marked as "beta" or "experimental".
I'm an educator at university, and I cannot tell you how many times students get stuck on this single issue despite me explaining it multiple times. Such option would make the first approach to Blender much easier to newcomers.