> You can still use Ctrl + Shift + A to deselect all in paint select and right
> click paint to deselect a few.
The hotkeys Deselect All, Ctrl+Shift+A, or Deselect All Using Filter,
Ctrl+Shift+F have always made me laugh. It's a super uncomfortable
hotkey that takes about two seconds to correctly position your hand
for, voiding the entire benefit of it being a hotkey, and potentially
leading to user injury.
At around XSI 1.5, the guys at ILM had began to nickname the product
"Softimage RSI" (Repetitive strain injury) in part due to the heavy
use of keyboard for selection and manipulation and then menus all the
way to the left and right of the screen.
There is not much wisdom in the softimage keymap. It's pretty much old
SI3D legacy, plus keys based on the first English letter of the name
of the function, plus results of misguided consistency debates (G is
used for grid in the DS Fcurve editor, we should reserve G everywhere
else for the grid!) plus stuff assigned to whatever key was left after
that. There was an obsession early on XSI to map every single key and
modifier on the keyboard, quickly leaving no room for new commands or
user customization.
So you have default hotkey for the render region ("Quick render"),
Grid and camera Reset simply because these commands were programmed
early on, and that was the first English letter of the name of that
command. And polygon raycast is mapped to "U" because it was mapped
to "G" in SI3D but the PM didn't want to let go of his "G" for grid so
gave modelers another key that would be near the original SI3D G.
Softimage|3D had a two-key hotkey system that was kind of brilliant
that could have helped things. For all selection commands, it was
spacebar+other key. For example, clear selection was spacebar+c.
Queries were on "Q" so querying the scene information was Q+S.
Another solution, probably better and more conform to modern ways,
would have been to have hotkeys per modeling/animation/etc.
At the very least I would have liked them to leave 3 to 5 hotkeys free
on the keyboard that can be remapped instantly from a menu without
creating a whole new keymaps, so that anyone could have mapped their
most frequent commands, the one that's appropriate to them at that
moment instead, without fear of hiding a built-in function.
