Select range of clips in Kdenlive

Question

I'm editing a video in Kdenlive. After I cut out stuff, there are holes (parts with no video nor audio with video and audio to the left and to the right where the parts to the left and to the right should be concatenated) which need to be removed.

There seems to be a feature for removing those holes as there is a context menu entry called Remove Space when right-clicking empty space in a timeline.

However, it always displays the error message

Cannot remove space in a track with a group

because I grouped my clips and it apparently can't remove space automatically if groups are used.

There is exactly the same amount of space on all tracks which have any content at this point on the timeline as I cut out part of a group.

The only way I see to close such a gap is to select all clips to the right of it and move them to the left. This is very cumbersome there are dozens of clips or groups of clips to right and I don't see how I can select many clips or groups of clips at once.

How I currently go about it is to click the first clip to the right of the gap, then hold down the control key, and then click every single other clip on all tracks. This not only is very cumbersome but it also yields the problem that if I miss any clip, I have to start over again, as I can't move my selection in this case and finding the clip that's not selected is virtually impossible.

Is there an easy way to close such a gap? Possibly by selecting a range of clips? So that I only have to click some part of the time line and then another part of it and it automatically selects all clips in that range? Or this thing file browsers commonly allow you to do where you draw a rectangle around the items you want to select:

I use Kdenlive 15.12.3 on Ubuntu 16.04. As of this writing (2017-06-05), this is the newest version in the official Ubuntu 16.04 software repositories.

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Edit: I just posted this question in the Kdenlive forum: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=265&t=140571

Answer 1

You can box-select clips by dragging the mouse while holding the shift key and and left mouse button.

kdenlive "Selection" manual

If the clips you want to select are all contiguous, you can press Shift + left-click and drag your mouse over all the clips

(and ctrl+shift+mouseDrag to add more clips to the selection)

Answer 2

I didn't find a way of selecting a range of clips but the main problem is solved by the spacer tool which can be invoked by pressing M. One then grabs the left end of the clip to the right of a gap and drags it to the left until the gab is closed. By doing so, all clips to the right are automatically moved to the left as well.

When browsing through the different tools, I incorrectly assumed the spacer tool to be a restricted version of the selection tool because of its mouse pointer symbol: I assumed one could use it to expand clips to the left or to the right like with the selection tool (but not select clips).