One of the major unsolved issues for left click select in Blender 2.8, is the problem of scrubbing in the Timeline and other animation editors. We would like this to be done with the left mouse button, but the problem is, we cannot use the same mouse button for both selection and setting/scrubbing the playhead.
We can solve this by adding a scrubbing strip to all animation editors, so that you can scrub the playhead inside one region, but select in the rest. In fact, as it turns out, we already have such a region, which can be configured to work this way. This is the Markers region, which already exists at the bottom of all animation editors.
All that's needed then, is to make some visual changes to the markers sub-region inside the animation editors. The keymap/interaction part can already be done inside the keymap.
{F6903427, size=full}
When the Timeline is very short, you can then still drag to scrub:
{F6907663, size=full}
The changes to achieve the above are:
- Step 1: Move marker region to the top
- Step 2: Make it always visible and more visually prominent
- Step 3: Move the frame numbers from the scrollbar to this region
- Step 4: Make the scrollbar thinner to match other areas
- Step 5: Change the left click keymap to scrub inside this area, but select everywhere else (trivial)
Once the above visual change is made, we can easily fix/update the default keymap to make proper use of it, as is already done here: D4626