Drawing a straight line in Piano View

I'm just starting to get used to the Smart Tool in X1 after having been with SP5 for the past 6 years. For the most part, I love it. But a couple things are throwing me in the Piano Roll View.
 
Drawing a straight line in the controller pane. In SP5 it was simply hold down the SHIFT key. According to the X1 manual, it's the same—except it doesn't work. With the Smart Tool I tried ALT+SHIFT. With the Draw tool, I tried holding SHIFT. Nothing. I know there's a line tool under the draw tool, but that's the long way around for me, having to switch tools and then modes to draw a line then switch everything back. Also, I've found that I have to turn off the Snap grid as well, otherwise the controller events snap as well which is rarely what I want. i.e. if I want to draw a decending line of pitch wheel events and I have the grid @ 1/16, the pitch wheel events will be entered on every 1/16 beat only.
 
So, under X1, to draw a simple straight line: Press T to bring up the tool panel, click the draw tool, click the line tool, slide up to the Control bar to turn snapping off, slide back down to where I was and draw the line. Then, press T to bring up the tool panel again, click the Smart Tool, scoot up to the Control bar to turn snapping back on, and scoot back down to where I was. Just to draw a line. They can't be serious.
 
In SP5 it was just simply holding down SHIFT. That's it. The X1 manual says it's the same, so I'm hoping I'm just dense and missing something, rather than it actually having to go the way I outline above.

It's Shift+Ctrl+Alt to draw a straight line with the smart tool.

Quick access to the straight line tool is F9 twice initially and then once back at the smart tool you can press and hold F9 to draw the line, release it to return to the smart tool.

F12 turns snap on/off.

Why doesn't the HELP file say this? At least where I looked there's nothing on it.
 
At any rate, glad you asked this cause I've been frustrated too. The HELP file is incorrect.
 
At least now I can stop switching tools.
 
Steve

soens

My ideas was to hold ctrl+alt and simply click the begining and end points and your line is drawn.

LOL, would you believe I actually tried that while trying to figure this out? That would've been a nice alternate way to do it. You must do graphics too, as that's a trick that drawing apps like CorelDraw employ to sketch straight lines.

I've gotten used to now having to hold ALT to draw, and the other Smart Tool techniques are now becoming second nature for me. I work really fast in the PRV so at first I found myself hitting Undo constantly while trying to break old habits and getting aggravated. Now that I'm "getting there", I find myself really appreciating the Smart Tool. But what I think is more backwards than now having to hold 3 keys to draw lines is having to keep toggling the snap grid on/off. It makes no sense that controller data would snap to the grid by default.

There's no need to hold 3 keys unless you want to stay with start tool. Once the "Line tool" has been selected initially (F9 twice) and you are using the smart tool you can either press and hold F9 and then release to get back to the smart tool or switch to the line tool by pressing F9 & then switch back to the smart tool by pressing F5.

I don't bother with the triple modifier either but it's there if someone must.