Selecting way is uneasy

[A_Pirard]

At medium zoom, although there is enough room to click between two nodes, it's uneasy to click and select a way because of the prominent snapping to nodes.
Higlighting the way from a distance (beside) to click and select it is uneasy too, again because node attraction. And in this case, it's even frustrating because clicking does not even select the highlighted node.
I imagine either inserting a delay before snapping and/or disabling snapping from the distance.
But you may imagine better.
It would be a real saving of trying time and zooming in to succeed.
TIA.

[Klumbumbus]

If we change it, then people complain, that it is too hard to select nodes. Even when we added the node shrinking with zoom, people complained, that it is now harder to select nodes, although the clicking radius did not change.

clicking does not even select the highlighted node.

This should not be the case. Please double check.

One improvement could be #10540, but requires #9891

[A_Pirard]

Note: by snapping I mean "attracting" the mouse cursor, highlighting from a distance.
There could have been an acceptable solution: press the Ctrl key to disable snapping.
But alas the Ctrl key is already used to toggle the selection extension.
The problem was particularly acute when updating *.OSM files containing only boundaries.
That's because the node density along the ways is high.

But I finally noticed that it occurs only when my favorite CSS below is added.
With only the JOSM css,

• the nodes do not attract anything if the zoom is lower
• if the zoom gets higher and the nodes appear, there's enough room between them to click on the ways.

So, I just turn off my css when doing that kind of business.

And I set the status to worksforme (now).

Thanks.

canvas { background-color: #404040; }
node|z1-18
{ symbol-shape: square; symbol-fill-opacity: 0; symbol-size: 1; z-index:-1}
node|z19-
{ symbol-shape: square; symbol-stroke-color: navy; symbol-fill-color: rosybrown; symbol-size:8; z-index:1}

[Klumbumbus]

The internal mappaint style does not display untagged waynodes at low zoom, therefore you can not select the hidden nodes and it is easy to select ways. With your style node|z1-18{...} you override this rule. You could change your style that it also does not display untagged waynodes at low zoom. Then you can use them both together.

The code for the node display of the JOSM mappaint style is here https://josm.openstreetmap.de/browser/josm/trunk/styles/standard/elemstyles.mapcss#L4599

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The distance where a displayed node is highlighted is fixed (independent from zoom level) and can be changed with the key mappaint.node.snap-distance in the advanced preferences.