Designer: Move object to another layer

[max1josef]

This thread can be closed. I posted a new thread in Suggestions.

 

Has this topic been solved?

It's about a simple way of moving an object to another layer, without having to drag it through a long list of objects in the layer's panel. Like so:

• Right-Click on object
• Select "Move to layer" in the context menu
• Choose layer from list

 

See this example from Inkscape:

 

 

 

 

[GarryP]

As far as I know that sort of thing has not been implemented, but you can use Cut, then select the new parent layer, then use “Insert inside Selection” (on the toolbar), and then Paste.

[max1josef]

I just added this topic in Suggestions. So this thread can be closed.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, max1josef said:

See this example from Inkscape:

What if both an Inkscape document & an Affinity one each have a comparably large number of layers?m How is the Inkscape method any better for that?

[GarryP]

Both good questions.

For most non-trivial documents, especially those which have a complex ‘layer tree’, selecting a layer in the way suggested, and as shown in the attached video, would be fairly useless, even more especially as there doesn’t seem to be a thumbnail preview of the layers so the user has to pretty-much guess which layer they are selecting from the name (which may be ‘generic’) and have a good overall organisational sense of their document.

The existing Cut/Set-insert-method/Paste method would seem much easier/better to me since the user can more-easily select the new parent layer via either the Layers Panel or the canvas and see what they are selecting much more easily.

All-in-all, as the case for change has been presented here, I don’t see it being an improvement.

[max1josef]

On 8/17/2023 at 9:04 PM, R C-R said:

What if both an Inkscape document & an Affinity one each have a comparably large number of layers?m How is the Inkscape method any better for that?

See this example with only two layers. The most annoying part in designer is the scrolling through dozens of objects in te layers tree. By the way, in a real world document I would know the meaning of my layers and name them accordingely...

Designer:

 

Inkscape:

 

 

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, max1josef said:

By the way, in a real world document I would know the meaning of my layers and name them accordingely...

As you can see from your Affinity example, in that app you can have dozens of layers with generic names like "Rectangle" (or "Curve" or "Pixel" pr any of around a dozen other names). Would you really name them all?

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

As you can see from your Affinity example, in that app you can have dozens of layers with generic names like "Rectangle" (or "Curve" or "Pixel" pr any of around a dozen other names). Would you really name them all?

But this topic is about Layers (capital L), not layers (e.g., random objects/shapes). It's more likely they'd name the Layers, probably.

[R C-R]

4 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

But this topic is about Layers (capital L), not layers (e.g., random objects/shapes). It's more likely they'd name the Layers, probably.

Actually, it wasn't clear to me until now if this was about any kind of layer or the capital L kind of container layer. Regardless, I'm not sure if there are a lot of the container types in a document that they would all be given meaningful names, or that if several of them already contained several different objects that moving one from one to another container Layer via a menu like that would place it in the desired position in that Layer.

IOW, it seems like a very limited use option.

[max1josef]

Some here don't understand or don't want to understand my concern, instead they take the attitude, "What is useless to me must be useless to everyone else." Not a good style of discussion in my opinion.

[thomaso]

5 hours ago, max1josef said:

The most annoying part in designer is the scrolling through dozens of objects in te layers tree.

True, especially if layer dragging delays at the upper or bottom panel edge or when it speeds up massively.

I avoid layer dragging but prefer using the "jump move" buttons (I guess they aren't mentioned yet in this thread?). Also the 3 paste buttons can be easier than dragging.

For your request thread I agree to Walt etc. that it would help if you mention there that you have especially layers of type "Layer" in mind, just to avoid the layer-names arguing.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, max1josef said:

Some here don't understand or don't want to understand my concern, instead they take the attitude, "What is useless to me must be useless to everyone else."

Not what I'm saying at all, only that it would be an option of limited use in Affinity, in part because I think a capital L Layer container layer typically would have quite a few layers in it, so unless there was some way to specify where in that Layer the layer is being moved to in the popup menu, users would still have to move it to the desired place in that container manually via the Layers panel.

So consider that in the Inkscape example it appears the Layer 2 layer initially is empty, so the moved "rect2" rectangle becomes its only contained layer. But if say Layer 2 already has dozens of objects in it (like Layer 1 appears to) then where in the Layer 2 stack should the moved layer be moved to? What if the situation was reversed & something from Layer 2 (or 3 or whatever) was to be moved into Layer 1? Should it always be moved to the top of that Layer's stack or what?

There could be a hierarchy in the popup menu with the target Layer's children listed in a hierarchy of submenus (because container Layers can contain among other things other container Layers), but it still could present very long lists in the submenus to scroll through if the target Layer has lots of layers in its hierarchy.

Admittedly, the attached Stupid Layers example.afdesign example is very contrived but it does illustrate the kind of Layer complexity that can occur in Affinity documents that could be problematic for a popup 'move to' menu. For instance, imagine wanting to move one of the small green ellipses nested in the purple cog in Layer 1 into a specific position in Layer 3 like between the 2 text layers.

[v_kyr]

On 8/17/2023 at 11:05 AM, max1josef said:

It's about a simple way of moving an object to another layer, without having to drag it through a long list of objects in the layer's panel.

Looks to be pretty useful for all container types no matter if Layers, Groups or Compounds here.

[R C-R]

8 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Looks to be pretty useful for all container types no matter if Layers, Groups or Compounds here.

What about for complex container hierarchies with lots of nesting & lots of objects in their nested layers? IOW, how do you avoid having to scroll through long lists somewhere when there are say 100+ objects in the document distributed among various capital L Layers, their possibly several different levels of nested groups, & so on? Plus, what about specifying where in the target container's layer hierarchy the selected layer should be moved to if it has many different layers stacked in some complex hierarchy?

I guess what I am asking is how Inkscape handles things like this. So far, the Inkscape examples I have seen here just show moving an object into an empty container Layer, which I think would usually not be the case.

[v_kyr]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

What about for complex container hierarchies with lots of nesting & lots of objects in their nested layers? IOW, how do you avoid having to scroll through long lists somewhere when there are say 100+ objects in the document distributed among various capital L Layers, their possibly several different levels of nested groups, & so on? ...

And what do you do actually? It's much better and faster than always manually dragging things along any long and complex hierarchies, further you just need to be shown the containers where to place an item to and not their contents. - Thing about it in a similar fashion like dealing with files & directories/folders structures, if I want to move some file into a specific available folder, I just need to know and define which folder.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

... further you just need to be shown the containers where to place an item to and not their contents...

Again, what about when you want to place the moved object to a specific place in the layer stack of the container object, like say the 6th position of a container with say 12 items in it?

11 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

Thing about it in a similar fashion like dealing with files & directories/folders structures, if I want to move some file into a specific available folder, I just need to know and define which folder.

But similar to the above, what if the target folder contains multiple subfolders & I want to move a file or folder into a specific subfolder, one that is several levels deep in the folder hierarchy?

I am just trying to understand how this popup menu approach would work in the general case where there are lots of items in an arbitrary stack of multiple kinds of layers, too many to appear in one popup menu without scrolling or complicated submenus. How does it work in Inkscape?

[v_kyr]

29 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Again, what about when you want to place the moved object to a specific place in the layer stack of the container object, like say the 6th position of a container with say 12 items in it?

You are again obviously overstressing/overcomplicating the whole theme, the easiest is to place it top or bottom and afterwards to finetune if needed. As most people either way don't remember after one or two days how many items some container does contain for complex drawings.

37 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I am just trying to understand how this popup menu approach would work in the general case where there are lots of items in an arbitrary stack of multiple kinds of layers, too many to appear in one popup menu without scrolling or complicated submenus. How does it work in Inkscape?

Download & install Inkscape, feed it with some complex drawing and give it a try, then you know!

[R C-R]

50 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

You are again obviously overstressing/overcomplicating the whole theme, the easiest is to place it top or bottom and afterwards to finetune if needed.

I am just trying to consider typical real world Affinity documents, which can & usually do have a complex layer structure, one that can contain for example no capital L Layers at all or many of them or a mix both Layer & other layer types, & various levels of nested items, including multiple artboards or pages, grouped & ungrouped items, adjustments applied to individual items or groups, & so on.

50 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

As most people either way don't remember after one or two days how many items some container does contain for complex drawings.

But they do need to consider how those items are structured in the Layers panel if they want to move them to somewhere else & get the results they want or expect. So they usually will need to find those items in the Layers panel after moving them anyway, so again, I have to wonder how useful this 'move to Layer' feature actually would be in typically complex Affinity documents.

EDIT:  As an example of what I mean about real world complex Affinity documents, consider the sample-thundercat-by-ellisphee or the sample-plushies-summoner-by-frankentoon document available in the Samples pane of the New document window of AD V2, or for that matter any of the similarly complex samples available in APub V2, or any of the samples available in AP 2. In any of them, how useful do you think this feature would be?

[v_kyr]

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

... So they usually will need to find those items in the Layers panel after moving them anyway ...

"Find in Layers Panel".

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

... so again, I have to wonder how useful this 'move to Layer' feature actually would be in typically complex Affinity documents.

... and again as already said before, give it a try in Inkscape and you will know! Or look alternatively how you can do the same in Illustrator, but there in a different "...select an object and move it to an afterwards selected Layer..." manner.

1 hour ago, R C-R said:

EDIT:  As an example of what I mean about real world complex Affinity documents ...

First I don't use and also actually don't have (...the even more buggy) V2 apps installed. Second I don't need to look after samples etc., as I before already understood the concept of faster movement turnarounds that feature would additionally offer here!

 

[R C-R]

16 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

"Find in Layers Panel".

Yes, & then move them to the desired place in that layer's stack, so you still have to use the Layers panel for that.

17 minutes ago, v_kyr said:

... and again as already said before, give it a try in Inkscape and you will know!

That will not tell me how well it would work in Affinity because as I have mentioned several times now, in Affinity documents there can be complex layer structures considerably different from those in Inkscape. Examples are easy to find in the samples available in either V1 or V2.

[v_kyr]

27 minutes ago, R C-R said:

That will not tell me how well it would work in Affinity because as I have mentioned several times now, in Affinity documents there can be complex layer structures considerably different from those in Inkscape. ...

If nothing tells you either way here how that would work in Affinity as you say, why do you then discuss that to death at all here?  - Complex structured documents are available for all apps here, so also Inkscape. And if needed you can export from Affinity as PDFs/SVGs and try to reuse those then in Inkscape or Illustrator. Further especially for PS/Illustrator there are much more monster complex structured example docs available!

I leave you the last word and now say good night + goodbye here, since there is nothing more to say anyway!

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, v_kyr said:

If nothing tells you either way here how that would work in Affinity as you say, why do you then discuss that to death at all here? 

I'm just trying to figure out how useful this proposed feature would actually be in typical Affinity documents with complex structures like those in the samples available in V1 or V2. The OP seemingly -- at least at first -- wanted this only to apply to the capital L Layer container layer type, but since then it seems to have become more about it applying to any kind of layer, I suppose including those like in APub docs with a page structure or ones with artboards or whatever else that can be created with the suite of Affinity apps.

[thomaso]

2 hours ago, R C-R said:

I'm just trying to figure out how useful this proposed feature would actually be

Hardly. You will not reach this goal if you only argue in the opposite way and try to convince of your ideas about uselessness of this proposal.

On 8/17/2023 at 11:05 AM, max1josef said:

a simple way of moving an object to another layer, without having to drag it through a long list of objects in the layer's panel.

I wonder why Affinity didn't get its Arrange "jump move" feature further developed, to leave & enter container layer levels the button way, actually the menu entries "Move Outside" / "Move "Inside" ... not just grayed out buttons.

 

It reminds me to layer arrange options in ID: there a container layer shows a colour marker of a currently selected object … and allows to drag this marker on another layer to move the according object between collapsed layers.

–>

Quite nice since this way unfolding layers and/or scrolling in the layers panel is a lot less required than in Affinity.

Another option could be more interactive cooperation between layout and Layers panel, for instance to drag an object from the layout to a wanted position in the layer hierarchy.

Interestingly there exists an interface the other way: If I drag a layer from the panel onto the layout I get a '+' cursor. Initially it made me think I could copy an object this way – but in fact this interface has no function implemented.

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, thomaso said:

You will not reach this goal if you only argue in the opposite way and try to convince of your ideas about uselessness of this proposal.

How many times do I have to say that I think this would be of limited usefulness, not totally useless?????

[thomaso]

4 hours ago, R C-R said:

How many times do I have to say that I think this would be of limited usefulness, not totally useless?????

Not even once. Everything is of limited usefulness. Nothing is unlimited useful.