LayOut Selection Frustations - Give us a Pure Select Tool

LayOut
1

I’m really getting increasingly frustrating with the time I’m wasting when simply trying to select objects in LayOut.

This applies to overlapping objects, objects that are skinny (like a line), and objects where I want to add an anchor point, or objects where tyu have like a line (with multiple segments) that LayOut assumes that you want to manipulate the Bounding box (?!).

When objects are close together, the Selection widget/point turns into a Move tool or Scale or Rotate tool.

I want a Pure Selection Tool. Don’t make it change to a Scale/Move/Rotate tool after I have selected one object. This makes selecting a second object annoying (and sometimes when attemting to Add a Selection, it generates a copy of the original object (because Ctrl+Click+move/rotate = Copy).

We already have Move/Scale/Rotate tools independently with their own shortcut keys…same as SketchUp.

To overcome this disfunctional tool, I keep doing these dumb workarounds like Deleting an object then selecting/manipulating an object below that, and then pasting the original object back on top.
This sort of workflow is infuriating and shoudn’t be part of the LayOut design. Ending up with multiuple copies of objects is also annoying and leads to drawing errors.

(All I’m doing in LayOut, by the way, is making annotations, legends, text callouts, map overlays, etc. SketchUp is the CAD/Design tool, not Layout. )

In the graphic below:
Red Line (6pt stroke) is behnd the grey arrow. Can’t select the red line without first deleting/moving the grey arrow.

Once selected, the rotate/move groups are so difficult to see. I keep inadvertantly rotating the line or pulling the rotation centre somewhere else.
This is not a tiny object that I’m trying to select at a distant zoom level…I am very much zoomed in and peering close to my monitor.

Also note in this image that the Scale grips are not even aligned to the direction of the Line or arrow - they are the “bounding box” (which is a pretty useless concept in CAD… 2d drawing objects don’t have/need Bounding Boxes like they do in 3d).

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Further - give us an “Add anchor Point” tool that works - make it snap to the edge that we are editing - not every other edge nearby. It is very difficult to add Anchors on some lines..I dont know why, they just dont like it and it takes about 100 attempts.
Again, a multipurpose tool is a FAIL for these sorts of operations within a technical drawing.

Thanks
/Rant.

2

I agree with this rant.
Just so you know you’re not alone.

I have to do similar hacks to navigate stacked objects in a LO drawings.

For me this just makes one of the best cases for an outliner type panel of all objects in the drawing and being able to see all objects by page and then by group. It should be no different than in a graphics program (which apparently no one believes LayOut is) like Affinity or Photoshop or Illustrator. All elements have a place in those applications as a “layer”.

Seems like it would be so easy to create an “Outline” style panel just like in SketchUp so we maintain similar naming. This panel would allow us to lock/unlock each element, have visibility control for each element, and select any element we want in an overlaid graphic like in these images.

I believe this would then eliminate all the selection frustration.
You could group a stack of elements and click on it, look in the outliner, open the group and select the single element you want to control and get to work.

3

yep. exactly. like in illustrator, the layer panel doubles as an outliner panel. it works perfectly.

1 Like
4

Yep, I felt the same frustration about ease of object selection in LO!

Suggestion to the LO developers:

facilitate selection of superimposed entities by pressing the ‘tab’ key for cycling through all options.

-Graphically, the elements can be distinguished by a bold or coloured outline during the cycling-through process.

- when you stop pressing the ‘tab’ key, whichever object is the last highlighted , that becomes the active selection.

- Then you would continue normallywith your operation (delete, move, etc)

5

I use the tab key in Layout to perform a double mouse left-click via AutoHotKey.

I need tab to remain assignable with AHK and not hard coded into Layout.