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Inconsistent and frustrating stroke selection behavior


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Hello,

during the last couple of days I spent a lot of time with Designer. I watched most of the official tutorials and read the relevant parts of the documentation. So far, I love AD, but the following behavior drives me nuts and renders AD almost unusable for me.

I am trying to draw a brushed illustration using a Wacom. I have hundreds of strokes and want to clean them up: sort them into groups assign different stroke widths etc. However the selection process seems to be almost impossible hard. Please consider the following quick screen-capture:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_DsJZdXqWzY" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

( https://youtu.be/_DsJZdXqWzY )

It shows the following problems:

  1. Frequently, I'm am accidentally creating copies by dragging with ALT or CMD
  2. Pressing CMD-Z once will only undo the offset but not the duplication which leads to two identical copies of the strokes precisely on top of each other (it took me hours to actually notice this behavior and now I'm always using slightly transparent stroke colors)
  3. Trying to select a stroke by clicking with CMD+SHIFT is totally random. Sometimes I'm lucky but it feels like most of the time a random neighbor stroke is being selected. (SketchApp always shows the inner bezier-line as hover before clicking which makes it possible to quickly select the right element without trail and error)
  4. Trying to select several elements with marquise-selection frequently does more damage than help, because I just create more accidental drag-copies.
  5. Drag zooming with SPACE+CMD+Drag is super fast. But if I accidentally press CMD+SPACE+Drag  (pressing in the wrong order) -> Yay, I just created another invisible copy and have to Press undo twice.
  6. I can't figure out the "Edit all Layers"-toggle. It should lock me into focusing on a single layout (without accidentally switching when CMD+selecting or dragging). But it doesn't seem to make any difference.
  7. The Isolate Layer-Mode (ALT+Clicking on a thumbnail) would be super useful, but sadly it is abandoned as soon as you want to select several elements.
  8. I have a hard time figuring out the precise working of the layer-player (Group vs. Layer vs. Component). Sometimes it seems to have an impact on the selection (esp if the toggles of "layer-items" are highlighted with a circle).
  9. The CTRL+CMD+Click context-selection frequently only lists a single "Curve >" icon, that can't be selected.

I guess I must be using it wrong so I'm looking for advice from advanced users. How are you doing this kind of basic selection work? 

As mentioned above, I frequently work with Sketch, and selecting stuff seems to be million times more efficient and logical there.

Thanks for your help. Any tips or pointers are very welcome.

Tom

 

EDIT:

I finally figured out, that the "Edit All Layers" toggle is to be taken literally: After promoting many of by Groups into proper Layers, this already helps quite a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

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