Pioof

As far as I can see, it doesn't make any difference in practice. Please give me an example of a difference between the selection of a layer and the selection of all its constituents, apart from what is displayed in the inspector window.
Anyway, that is not the key problem of this thread. The key problem is that "same" is supposed to be a symmetrical concept. If A is the same as B, then B should be the same as A. In the current implementation, it is not. I'm not asking why it is not, I think I begin to understand why AD works in that convoluted way, I'm just saying this is a stupid choice and a stupid implementation that breaks one the most basic assumptions a standard user holds. When your software does not behave as 99% people instinctively believes it should, you are obviously free to go on thinking they are uneducated and need to read the doc. Or you can change that behavior to make it intuitive. As far as I'm concerned, I see no value in the current implementation of "same transparency" and would never use it, if ever I adopted AD as a professional tool.

I'm coming back to see if there had been any progress on this issue. But no.
You have limited resources, right, but also wrong priorities I'm afraid. This is perplexing to me. You are probably catering to your existing user base, but you should understand that adding basic functionality would expand that user base significantly.
Anyway, still on AI CS6.

Hi. Back on this thread for a check, I found MEB's above 'explanation'. Thanks for that. It seem to vindicate my earlier hypothesis that devs initially chose a data structure that makes selection by attributes very impractical (thus very slow). Sorting this mess out would mean rewriting most of the code, a formidable task that would not offer clear benefits to the existing users of AD (compared to adding fancy 'creative' features). So my hunch is that AD 1.x will never have selection by attributes. And it's not even obvious whether AD 2.x will have the different internals that could allow it.
All in all, I won't waste my time any more with AD. Too bad, on paper, it seemed cool.

Hi. Back on this thread for a check, I found MEB's above 'explanation'. Thanks for that. It seem to vindicate my earlier hypothesis that devs initially chose a data structure that makes selection by attributes very impractical (thus very slow). Sorting this mess out would mean rewriting most of the code, a formidable task that would not offer clear benefits to the existing users of AD (compared to adding fancy 'creative' features). So my hunch is that AD 1.x will never have selection by attributes. And it's not even obvious whether AD 2.x will have the different internals that could allow it.
All in all, I won't waste my time any more with AD. Too bad, on paper, it seemed cool.

Jesus Christ, this has evolved one of the most commented topics in the "Suggestions for Affinity Designer on Desktop" subforum.
This has been 4,5 years since the initial post, this is kind of infuriating: I don't know about the compound of your user base, but I hardly can imagine, that all of them would be solely graphic designers. I myself is an architect, which is very related to drawing stuff, but Affinity Designer is not my main tool, but I have it to complement my workflow, to make competition drawings fancier, to clean things up, etc. But I cannot do this, because after importing such PDFs/SVGs (ehm, DWG support?), it takes an insane amount of time to order things to a managable manner: in Illustrator, we had the "select same" options. I will go further: this is the "standard" of the selection process to me, this is a screenshot of ARCHICAD. I'm not going to expect this to happen, because this software is over 30 years old now and costs a few magnitude more than any of your products:

 
But to confuse the need for such things with global colours show, that not even the user base has the proper idea why this is important. Yes, if I create documents from scratch, I can use them, but lets say I have a masterplan with tens of thousands of lines, where colour, linetype, thickness can be the differentiating thing, please don't expect me to manually select all the "dashed red hairlines" in my file, because that's just not cutting it. Speaking of cutting: I guess some other out there is dealing with laser cutting from time to time, where the intensity and the speed can be controlled with colours with many machines. If I have a file (again, created in an external source), I would like to recolour everything to the necessary colours. The use cases of this feature would not be  "in-the-application" workflow, rather "to-the-application" workflow, when you don't have an illustration set up in Designer's terms. Right now, it is painstakingly manual. 
To sum it up, there is a plenty of people out there willing to support this company, because Adobe is not feasible for them. Many of these are supposedly not graphic designers. If you are not going to implement features, that are important for them, it is completely fine with me, but the lack of meaningful feedback makes people fed up. It seems to me, that there is a tendency for me to find features that are not "artistic" and has no love on the development side. I understand that you are developing a fairly new set of products, which has unforeseen delays and complications, but what I miss is the feedback. Right now there are no input from the development here, if someone would explain the situation why its not yet done, why it won't be done, what are the more important things, focus areas for you, then it is fine. But that is by far not the case!
 

Same as B4ttleCat, by using Adobe Illustrator.
There's no workaround to this feature.
You'll have to love manually selecting a zillion of objects without mistake (an interesting psychometric task, sure).
Funny I haven't totaly given up on AD and still checking this forum every 6 months or so. Seeing for how long the issue has been around, I suggest that the moderators should write a sticky post "Tomorrow, AD gets the oft-requested selection by attribute". This would save them some time (ok, not that we get feedback on the issue very often).

This! 
This is an essential and VERY easy to implement feature: just grab whatever feature is wanted from the currently selected item and traverse the tree. Done.
 
While we are at it: Another hard to miss feature: Select a bunch of objects, click one of them to designate as the reference object, then do whatever alignment on them.
And no, to use a dropdown menu to select first/last is just not cutting it. Again, rather easy to implement.
Before adding more complex features, Serif should rather focus on usability. Because without the latter, the former don't matter.

I'm coming back to see if there had been any progress on this issue. But no.
You have limited resources, right, but also wrong priorities I'm afraid. This is perplexing to me. You are probably catering to your existing user base, but you should understand that adding basic functionality would expand that user base significantly.
Anyway, still on AI CS6.

I'm coming back to see if there had been any progress on this issue. But no.
You have limited resources, right, but also wrong priorities I'm afraid. This is perplexing to me. You are probably catering to your existing user base, but you should understand that adding basic functionality would expand that user base significantly.
Anyway, still on AI CS6.

I'm coming back to see if there had been any progress on this issue. But no.
You have limited resources, right, but also wrong priorities I'm afraid. This is perplexing to me. You are probably catering to your existing user base, but you should understand that adding basic functionality would expand that user base significantly.
Anyway, still on AI CS6.

I'm coming back to see if there had been any progress on this issue. But no.
You have limited resources, right, but also wrong priorities I'm afraid. This is perplexing to me. You are probably catering to your existing user base, but you should understand that adding basic functionality would expand that user base significantly.
Anyway, still on AI CS6.

I'm not davision, but I'd say that the ability to rotate the canvas (rather than the object after you've created it) is not an essential functionality. Similarly, adding and editing a pressure profile curve along any path is certainly nice to have, may speed up certain effects, but its absence won't block you from using the app.
The inability to do multiple selections based on color/weight/appearance/... is a showstopper for anybody working with complex documents, especially when editing these documents, not creating them. Right now AD is ok for simple layouts like web site graphics, or for some illustration projects. It's completely inadequate for even moderately technical projects, which I believe is the most frequent use of AI. They'd get more long-term customers and revenue from this population of users with a few features crucial for power users than with new brushes or texture effects.
Right now I don't mind, I'm still working fine with AI CS6. When it'll stop working completely because of OS change, I'll go back to Affinity to see what they've been up to in the meantime. See, I'm even checking right now out of pure curiosity...

I'm not davision, but I'd say that the ability to rotate the canvas (rather than the object after you've created it) is not an essential functionality. Similarly, adding and editing a pressure profile curve along any path is certainly nice to have, may speed up certain effects, but its absence won't block you from using the app.
The inability to do multiple selections based on color/weight/appearance/... is a showstopper for anybody working with complex documents, especially when editing these documents, not creating them. Right now AD is ok for simple layouts like web site graphics, or for some illustration projects. It's completely inadequate for even moderately technical projects, which I believe is the most frequent use of AI. They'd get more long-term customers and revenue from this population of users with a few features crucial for power users than with new brushes or texture effects.
Right now I don't mind, I'm still working fine with AI CS6. When it'll stop working completely because of OS change, I'll go back to Affinity to see what they've been up to in the meantime. See, I'm even checking right now out of pure curiosity...

I'm not davision, but I'd say that the ability to rotate the canvas (rather than the object after you've created it) is not an essential functionality. Similarly, adding and editing a pressure profile curve along any path is certainly nice to have, may speed up certain effects, but its absence won't block you from using the app.
The inability to do multiple selections based on color/weight/appearance/... is a showstopper for anybody working with complex documents, especially when editing these documents, not creating them. Right now AD is ok for simple layouts like web site graphics, or for some illustration projects. It's completely inadequate for even moderately technical projects, which I believe is the most frequent use of AI. They'd get more long-term customers and revenue from this population of users with a few features crucial for power users than with new brushes or texture effects.
Right now I don't mind, I'm still working fine with AI CS6. When it'll stop working completely because of OS change, I'll go back to Affinity to see what they've been up to in the meantime. See, I'm even checking right now out of pure curiosity...

From the AD team response, I suspect that they initially botched up by not thinking a minute about this feature and decided on a data structure that makes this kind of automated selection impractical to code or horribly slow to run. Now they have either to recode vast portions of the program or set up a dual, redundant data structure to handle this (fast but memory-hungry).
Of course that's just speculation. But otherwise I don't see why after four years they still haven't implemented this obviously essential and much requested feature.

"Select same...."
The missing function.
And if you have spare time, align on click-selected object, à la Illustrator. Much more powerful than align on first/last.

I'm trying an evaluation version of AD, as a possible replacement of AI. The lack of smart selection is a deal-breaker for me. How many times did I select strokes of a given weight, or changed colors for a specific combination of weight & color... I'm usually editing EPS output from other programs that can happily spit out thousands of strokes in complex graphs. No way I'll be selecting them by hand!
You may dream of a neater, grander way to implement criterion-based selection than AI's, but if it's taking too much time then in the meantime please ape their elementary solution... it's really not rocket science.

Agreed. You know what helps sell more licenses? When I can honestly recommend the software to fellow designers. Until basic stuff like this is taken care of, I can't really do that.

I'm trying an evaluation version of AD, as a possible replacement of AI. The lack of smart selection is a deal-breaker for me. How many times did I select strokes of a given weight, or changed colors for a specific combination of weight & color... I'm usually editing EPS output from other programs that can happily spit out thousands of strokes in complex graphs. No way I'll be selecting them by hand!
You may dream of a neater, grander way to implement criterion-based selection than AI's, but if it's taking too much time then in the meantime please ape their elementary solution... it's really not rocket science.

I'm trying an evaluation version of AD, as a possible replacement of AI. The lack of smart selection is a deal-breaker for me. How many times did I select strokes of a given weight, or changed colors for a specific combination of weight & color... I'm usually editing EPS output from other programs that can happily spit out thousands of strokes in complex graphs. No way I'll be selecting them by hand!
You may dream of a neater, grander way to implement criterion-based selection than AI's, but if it's taking too much time then in the meantime please ape their elementary solution... it's really not rocket science.