@SASKiwi you hit the nail on the head when you said 'its a pity this behaviour is not consistent across all SAS coding interfaces.'
After discussing with Casey it was decided that in an effort to align SAS Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide and to take into consideration all those who are used to DMS (Display Manager), this is what we're proposing for a future release of EG.
EG will use the running man icon and change the Submit button behavior to be “if code is selected, run selection, otherwise run all code. EG will now be consistent with Studio and DMS.
We will also have “Submit all” and "Submit selection" context menu items. - see attached image
Of course F3 and F8 will continue to behave they way they do now, which will be consistent with the behavior of the Submit icon (we'll make sure that these keyboard shortcuts behave the same in EG and Studio).
... View more