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Participating Frequently
November 17, 2022
Open for Voting

Cross-select and Window-select feature from Autodesk

  • November 17, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 174 views

I think Adobe should steal this idea of selection types by drag from Autodesk Autocad software. 
It works this way, if you click-drag mouse from left to right, whatever the box touches gets selected and if it is the opposite, whatever that falls completely within the selection bounds gets selected. The visual differentiation is shown by a blue tinted selection for cross select and green tinted box for window select. If this feature is included in all Adobe suite products, particularly Illustrator, PS, Aftereffects and InDesign, it'd accelerate the workflow exponentially.

 

If this feature is already available and hidden, someone kindly show me the way.

1 reply

Mylenium
Legend
November 17, 2022

Could be difficult to implement in either of the programs, let alone consistently across all of them. They all have different data models and different code for hit detection and intersections. In fact personally I would consider it 90% irrelevant for AE and for that matter also PS. If your file is so cluttered up, you can't get a clean selection of the underlying layers either way. You're not just selecting a stroke or any of that, you select the whole pixel content. In such a case you would simply select stuff on the timeline or in the layers palette, respectively. Similarly, I can't see how that would change anything in InDesign. If you have so many objects on your page that you would need such a selection mode, you're already screwed and haven't structured your layout in a smart way. There may be some value for this in Illustrator, but they never complained and there's a gigazillion other issues they wouold prefer to have fixed.

 

Mylenium