emj: When selecting, holding down ALT while draging will make it easier to select things with the “bounding box”, if you select to much hold down ALT-CTRL instead to deselect.
I have another one: Learn to use the selection search. You can do pretty stuff with it. Examples?
You want to download only the area you have changed something in? Search for “modified” and then click on “Auto-Zoom to current selection” (an advanced auto-zoom mode) and finally click on download. Now the current bbox is entered, which happens to be the changed area.
You entered several new line segments and want to select all new segments (to make a street out of them), but they are lined out in a curve and you can’t select them easily without also selecting other, old line segments? Search for “id:0 type:segment” (JOSM assign all new items an id of 0, so “id:0” searches for new items)
You want to find something only in a specific area? Select all the area, then choose “delete from selection” as search action and put a minus sign (-) before your search term. E.g. select whole Dresden and search with “delete from selection” for the string “-Eigenheimstrasse” if you plan to visit me
A the selection search thattook my a while to find, I had to enable the “selection list” (alt-e) to find the search button…
I use this “type:way -name:” to find all ways that have no name. This is because I don’t always manage to collect the names of streets so I just make them into a way for easier naming later.
So Imi how can I select something that has the key “type” on it. E.g. “type:parkway”.
I do not consider this a very nasty restriction, you always can just search for “parkway” only and get everything with parkway in any of the properties (which should result in almost the same). My preferences when designing the search were to make it easy to memorize instead of as complete as possible.
To continue with some search tips: try to enter an url as search string to load a list of items to select instead of real searching. As example, Joerg Ostertag (the gpsdrive guy) has done some statistic over a data snapshot and providing urls with lists of probably errors. So try to search for http://www.ostertag.name/osm/OSM_errors_segment-no-distance.xml to select all zero-length-segments.
Or “search” for saved osm files on your harddisk (file://…) to select all items that exists in the saved file (unfortunatly, only the id is compared and so no new created items are selected, even if they exist in the saved file and the current loaded one).
