The Mad Selector plugin is oriented towards making it easier to select the stuff you want, tho it has tended to spread into the related area of organizing the group structure. It puts three main items onto the face, poly, group and entity menus (not all available for all menus).

This appears as a submenu for faces, and an item for polys and groups. The face submenu has subitems `To Adjacent Faces' and `To Linked Faces'. The first extends the current selection to faces that are exactly coplanar to the selected face, and share an edge with it, and likewise to further faces adjecent to these in the same way. So that if the floor of a room is selected, and there is a say a pillar whose bottom is flush with the top of the floor, the bottom face of the pillar will join the multi-selection with the floor. -- if it works, which it doesn't always, for reasons I haven't figured out.

Extend Selection to Linked Faces on the other hand just extends the selection to other faces that are linked with the currently selected one, as described in the description of the plugin.

For groups and polys, there is currently only extend selection from the currently selected poly to faces that are adjacent to faces in that group or poly, so that if you drag the poly, these faces will be dragged along with it (I think it's better to drag faces instead of whole polys, but when I took this off the menu someone wanted it back, so here it is again).

This is for manipulating group structure, and other stuff. When you click it, for a face, poly, group or entity (brush or point), you get a submenu consisting of the groups etc. that contain what you've clicked, on starting with the item itself at the top and going down to worldspawn. Then when the mouse is over one of these, the chosen object, we'll say, you get a further submenu with four options:

• Zoom - zooms the map view to the chosen object.
• Select - selects that object, and also opens the tree view to the chosen object.
• Restrict - this has the effect of `restricting' the map view to the chosen object. Things not inside that object are greyed out, and can't be selected. I find this convenient if for example you want to work on the faces of a complex brush & don't want to waste time clicking past the floor and other stuff of the room it's in. To reverse restriction of selection, use the Unrestrict Selection item on the command and background menus (the one that appears when the mouse isn't over anything selectable in the map), or choose `worldspawn' from the Containing Objects submenu.
• Mark - the chosen object is `marked' for further options in the `Containing Groups' submenu. Marking is similar in conception to tagging, but the marked object is not drawn in any special way, and the difference between the ideas is supposed to be that marking is basically for reorganizing the tree structure rather than positioning things in the map.

One wart is that things aren't drawn right in the 3d window when selection is restricted; I've got some delphi code that draws only the stuff in the restriction correctly, but something else is wrong with the source I have so that certain models and textures aren't rendered correctly. Hopefully this will all be sorted out in Q5.11.

These are the items that actually reorganize the tree-structure. This appears as a submenu for entities, groups and polys, but as a single item, `Lift to Marked Group', for faces. This item will cause the selected face to become a member whatever group has been marked, so giving two-click face-sharing. For the others, the Move in Tree menu contains three items:

• Insert marked into this
• Insert marked over this
• Insert this into marked

Into and over refer to positions in the tree-view, and when the commands are enabled, `marked' is selected be the name of whatever is actually marked.