There’s a very strong precedent made by word processing apps, in which the cursor is always the place where edits are applied.
So when follow mode is off, is there a way to make the item at the cursor position be automatically selected until clicks are made elsewhere? I tend to scroll to the point where I want to make a change, then click the transpose +1 button for example, only to be reminded the hard way that the selection is somewhere else in the track, sometimes somewhere off-screen. I can ctrl-z to undo, but what exactly changed? How can I be sure I’ve properly undone what was mistakenly done?
Do I just need to beat into my head that the line is the play line only, and edits just don’t happen there unless I specifically select it first?
Play-wise or copy/paste wise?
Play-wise you can hit the enter key to play the current line, this also moves the bar to that position and it will be your offset if you continue with space.
Copy/paste wise, if you don’t have anything specifically selected, whatever is under the cursor will always be selected by default. As soon as you start marking areas, the marking areas will always be leading.
Then there is the one-time click vs double click behavior option you can set in the preferences.
I have a personal script with a few shortcuts I use. The one in bold is the one that may help. Just press it to select the current note before applying any advanced edit operations: