Select Layer directly from canvas

[simonlayfield]

Hey all!

Does anyone know whether there's a way to select a Layer directly from the canvas/artboard?

I often find myself Grouping objects just to be able to quickly move them around together freely, and then ungroup them again. It's two steps that would be really nice to not need to perform for such a quick task. You can move multiple objects together in a Layer, but as far as I know Layers can only be selected from within the Layers panel.

It would be really neat if there was a way to select the parent Layer of an object directly from the canvas. Maybe even command + click on an object? It doesn't look like there's a default binding for that...

I couldn't find anyone else asking for this on the forums and so perhaps there's no demand for this feature, but thought I'd sound it out all the same. Grouping just to adjust the overal position of multiple objects seems like unnecessary legwork if it worked the way as described.

Thoughts?

[walt.farrell]

As long as an object has a stroke or fill, and is not under another object, you should be able to click on it to select it. For multiple objects you can click the first and shift+click others.

Or, with the Move Tool, you can draw a selection marquee around the objects (or touching at least one part of each, if your options are set to allow that).

 

[MEB]

Hi simonlayfield,
There's no direct way to do want you want but If you are working with artboard based documents you can do this: click the artboard label/name on the top left (outside the canvas area) to select the artboard, then press and hold command and right-click anywhere on canvas to display object's three menu - click the name of the layer you want to select to select the whole layer.

Note: I'm not sure if the object's three menu is already implemented on Windows (will check out) but it's working on macOS already.