Smart picking?

First of all, Dan, you'd probably be doing yourself a favor to go through the tutorial provided by PTC. Follow this link:

Here are just some basics. The Smart filter lets you preselect and select anything ~ part, features, geometry. The whole trick is in preselection. If you can preselect it, you can pick it, left click to select. But, if the feature or geometry you want to select doesn't preselect, you can RMB click cycle through features and geometry in the area. This is a graphical Query select, but it only works on preselect. LMB click select only when the feature or geometry has highlighted in blue. I did an example of this in my post called 'Draft feature works'.

What if you're not sure what you've preselected? Wait a second and a label pops up with feature or geometry id tag. Also, at anytime in the preselect process, you can simply depress RMB to get an interactive menu. One of the menu items is 'Pick from list'. This is the old QS pick box. When you select from this list, the feature or geometry is selected and highlights in red.

There are some subtleties, however. The selection process is in branching tree format. That means that you can start at the top tree level (part) and work your way through feaures down to geometry. Selection through the Smart filter narrows down, the further in you go, but doesn't stop once you've picked, say, a feature. Picking a boss feature then gives you access to its geometry (surfaces, edges, vertices) and filters out other features and geometry. Or, rather than going deeper, you can RMB the popup menu for that selected feature/geometry to get your menu with edit, edit definition, info, etc.

BTW, the middle mouse button doesn't seem to play a role in this, except when you have something open with an OK, then it functions normally for accept. But, selection is done with the LMB.

David Janes