On other software I can press ctrl+alt and on the other layers a minus appears when I hover over them, clicking them means that layer’s content is removed from my current layer’s selection.
Thanks.
Hello @BingBong and welcome back 
Ctrl+Alt will give Action: Symmetric Difference for the selection tools, as will be indicated by the cursor showing a small ‘delta’ symbol.
Strangely, this is not shown in the manual:
Selections — Krita Manual 5.2.0 documentation
As you can see from the link, you need to press and hold the Alt key to get Action: Subtract.
Edit:Add: A thought occurs…
Do you mean the entire painted content of the layer, without use of a particular selection tool?
If so then you’d need to use the Select Opaque (Subtract) command which is only available as a keyboard shortcut, not assigned by default.
That and the (Add), (Intersect), (Replace) variants can be assigned keyboard shortcuts which is not as convenient as using the selection tool Action modifier keys.
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Ah, this is useful, so these selection tools absolutely do produce the same effect. Although it means I have to go onto the lower layer, then make the subtraction selection, then go to the other layer to then remove this overlapping content.
So, so far, this is very useful, thank you.
But is there a way for me to stay on the new layer and subtract select the content from the other layer more efficiently? It’s no big deal if not, it’s just that the ctrl+alt of the other software felt far smoother.
In the Tool Options docker of any given selection tool, at the bottom you can see the Reference options. The second one uses the merged result of all layer to make a selection. Does this helps?
I’m not seeing ‘reference’. Aside from the selection tool specifics (dimension for rectangular or circular etc) the two options are Mode (either pixel or vector selection) and Action (type of selection, replace, intersect, subtract, add, sym difference).
The Reference option is on the Tool Options docker for the Contiguous Selection tool and the Similar Colour Selection tool since these are the ones where content is ‘searched for’ by the tool.
Has your Tool Options docker become truncated at the bottom because it doesn’t have enough vertical space? You can drag it down at the bottom to give it more space.
Not that I can think of, If you use the Reference option ‘as merged copy’ then you’ll be selecting from the original layer as well which is probably not what you’d want.
Even removing all my other dockers, i’m only getting mode and action, there isn’t anything below it.
Here is is for the Contiguous Selection tool:
The shape and freehand selection tools don’t have that option because they don’t search for anything and so don’t refer to layer content.
Wow, my brain is small, I was on Polygonal selection. No wonder it wasn’t there.
Just tried it, it works perfectly. Thank you very much, Ahab and Daishishi.
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I just don’t think there isn’t a shortcut to change this reference in the fly, maybe it is possible using a Python script. Then you could assign the script to the Ten Scripts slots.
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