Attribute panel - modify all selected features by default?

[wayfaringrob]

When editing, I often will select several features for which I need to apply the same attribute. I'll do so with the attribute panel open. However, after selecting several features, there's typically only one selected in the panel for editing:

I understand the intention behind this, but in practice, I find it frustrating. Fresh from intentionally selecting multiple features, the attributes panel randomly selects only one of those features for you to edit by default. To modify the attributes for all the features that you just selected, you need to click again on the layer name in the panel.

Sometimes, it remembers that you made this secondary selection last time, but not always. I often forget to check if the layer name is selected, make my edit (to only one feature), click off, swear loudly, and need to repeat the whole selection query.

Is there a better workflow for me? Is there a way to have it just keep your whole selection...selected? How do you all manage this?

[DuncanHornby]

I have to admit I don't tend to use that panel I enter any attributes directly into the attribute table. It's just how I prefer to work. The advantage of this approach is that having selected some existing geometries on the map I can run the calculate field tool which you can access from the toolbar.

All geoprocessing tools will honour selections. This is how you bulk update a single field with a value.

[wayfaringrob]

Thanks for that. Might be useful for me in some situations. Right now, with the attribute panel, since I'm symbolizing by the fields that I'm editing (unique values), I'm able to edit multiple fields just from one drop-down selection (versus multiple field calcs). The only thorn in that is having to re-select the layer every time.

[John_Jones]

This isn't currently an option, I suggest making this an idea to gauge how popular adding an option for this would be. 

The downside would be performance (& memory) related.  Currently having the attributes pane open and making a large selection will basically read a small number of features from the database while if we select multiple we would need to read all those features to determine if each field should read "Different values" or not.  Of course for medium sized selections this would not be a significant cost but for very large selections it would become costly (particularly with remote data).  This behavior carries over from ArcMap so there is a long history of the current behavior so we would probably make it a user option the user could turn on rather than changing the default behavior.