Inspiring

Question

How do you select multiple objects in the layer list?

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
April 23, 2026
4 replies
116 views

I can find no way to select a range of objects in the layer list. I’ve seen a lot of inaccurate claims, even a video showing Shift-clicking to extend the selection (which is exactly what should happen, since that’s a universal standard across platforms). But this does not work (I’m mostly on Windows, BTW).

Dragging with hotkeys also doesn’t work.

Is this seriously broken in 2026? What is the point of filtering the list if you can’t multi-select in the results and perform some action?

It’s also mind-boggling that there’s no context menu. You can multi-highlight a range of objects by Shift-clicking on their names, but there’s no context menu where you might say “add to selection” or the like.

I also tried highlighting a range and then pressing the spacebar. This is the standard for toggling checkboxes with the keyboard. And it’s another standard violated by Adobe here, because it doesn’t work.

And finally, even if you have the object list filtered (I am showing only text objects), you can’t work around this problem by selecting the parent layer, because Illustrator incorrectly also selects things that don’t appear in the object list.

WTH?

Monika Gause

Community Expert

There are two scripts by Sergey Osokin: Select all layers above and select all layers below. Maybe check them out.

You can complain on this forum, but it will get you exactly nowhere. The only place where you can reach out to the engineers is on Uservoice. And yes, they are reading that.

Ares Hovhannesyan

Community Expert

I think the best way to bypass this problem is organizing object in separate layers during workflow, there is an option to Save selection in the bottom that can be used. My 2 cents.

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, but that is not an option in many cases. For example, this file was exported from TurboCAD, so I had no say in how the objects are organized.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

Use the Target symbol for that (the circle). Click on the first circle and the n hold shift and click on the last one you want to select.

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks, but that doesn’t work. It simply adds the second one to the selection, same as the Ctrl (or Command) key does.

Monika Gause

Community Expert

So this does not work?

Which version are you using?

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Not exactly sure what you are looking for, but you can select everything on a layer by clicking here:

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

T

Thomas_CalvinAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for the reply. But I don’t want to select everything on a layer. I want to select a range of objects. As I noted above, I can’t even select “Layer 1” in the screen shot below, because that erroneously selects non-text objects that aren’t shown in the list. Plus, that’s not a solution anyway, because often you won’t want to select everything on the layer. You just want a range.

Shift-click has been the universal standard for selecting a range for decades. And even more baffling is that it works in this list for “highlighting” entries, but you can’t do anything with that pseudo-selection.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded