New Select -> Select Content menu item: Select all non-transparent pixels in current layer

Features
1

This feature is already functionally implemented into Aseprite, when Ctrl-clicking a layer:

However, this is really unintuitive. All I’d like added, is for this operation to be possible via a new Select Content button in here, and optionally a hotkey as well, which does this on the current frame:

image

I think this would make it a bit easier for new users like myself to find the option to do this. My experience was that I had to do a Google search, or dig through the documentation, to find an arbitrary magic button combination that’s explained in one easily missable sentence. It’s pretty odd from a UI design standpoint, and fairly unintuitive. Why not just a regular button?

(One could also expand this suggestion to two new buttons, Select Frame Content and Select Layer Content.

The first would select the pixels in the current frame across all layers, the other would select only the pixels in the current layer of the current frame. Both could have their unique use cases.

I chose to focus on the functionality that already existed in Aseprite. The current implementation is equivalent to Select Layer Content.)

2

Thanks for your suggestion!
Just in case: to select a specific color in a layer (or the mask color) the regular procedure is:

  • Select the desired layer in the timeline.
  • Go to Select > Color Range
  • Select the color you want to to select

For artists with some experience::

  • Select the layer with ‘Ctrl+click’ on the desired drawing (this will automatically select the correct layer)
  • Press ‘W’ for the ‘Magic Wand Tool’, uncheck ‘Continuous’ and choose the color you want to select (also, it is possible to set the tool to reference visible or active layers)
    Screenshot 2023-10-17 at 10.02.22

or

  • Select the layer with ‘Ctrl+click’ on the desired drawing (this will autoselect the correct layer)
  • Go to Select > Color Range
  • Select the color you want to to select

I think the ‘Color Range’ tool, should include some selector to affect Active/Visible layer, issue just created: Add Active/Visible layers selector to 'Color Range' tool · Issue #4095 · aseprite/aseprite · GitHub