AshTeriyaki Posted April 22, 2015 Share Posted April 22, 2015 So here’s a big one :) Illustrator has some object selection tools, like selecting all objects of a certain type or some that share similar attributes, like fill colour. It’s very useful, but it could be done better. It’d be great to have fuzzy and conditional searching, provided you store enough information about objects. So you could do a search not only name but by object attributes. This would select all matching objects on the canvas to be moved, grouped, released, isolated etc. It opens up a huge world of possibilities on large documents, in a post UX features world this could be a world beater. It’s all well and good sketch having it’s symbols and shared styles, but on huge, complex UI documents... Well, yanno… You could do things like “All objects with X fill colour” or “All rectangles X wide” it gets even more exciting if you could make fuzzy searches like “All objects approx X wide” or “Red cogs at approximately X coordinate” A brucey bonus is if you guys we’re to save attributes like an object that is a duplicate. So if you had power duplicated a shape you could select all of them at once. “But what to do with these selections?” I hear no one say. Well! Save them. If you have a few hundred objects selected, you can save the selection to be recalled and modified later. Also you could manually select objects on the canvas to save to a set. AdrianKLægreid and denironaut 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MattP Posted April 23, 2015 Staff Share Posted April 23, 2015 All good ideas, Ash :) I know that advanced search and selection functionality is on our radar already anyway, but I'll make sure to keep these suggestions in mind at the time when we implement it :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Oval Posted July 15, 2015 Share Posted July 15, 2015 All good ideas, Ash :) I know that advanced search and selection functionality is on our radar already anyway, but I'll make sure to keep these suggestions in mind at the time when we implement it :) And please don’t forget the search and replace functionality … e.g. for replacing all objects that looks like the selected or just for selecting all rectangles with red 1 to 2 pt strokes. A bit better than in FreeHand. Agreed or too ambitious for the next update? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
begem0t Posted March 23, 2017 Share Posted March 23, 2017 Guys, anything resembling search year and a half later? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
begem0t Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 This topic seems to have died an ignominous death, so I'll try to revive it. A text / tag / metadata search would be a great professional capability addition. Please do consider it. Example: a common usage scenario for me is a lot of small icons/signs/signboards with different text.When I have to find certain one I'm going out of my mind (well, no - I just open it in Inkscape, where there is a nice search tool). I love Designer - it really is a pleasure to use, especially compared to Illustrator. But so many things are missing.... Obvious way would be to provide access to developers to build plugins? Am I'm missing something here? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rui_mac Posted May 26, 2017 Share Posted May 26, 2017 In FreeHand we had all this and it was great :-) FH_SELECT_FIND.pdf Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted May 26, 2017 Staff Share Posted May 26, 2017 Hi begem0t, As Matt said there's already plans to implement a search/selection functionality in the program however like any other feature requests all this requires time (or a huge dev team which we don't have). We have been implementing new features/closing the gaps to other app's functionality as fast as we can but since everything is being written/coding from scratch it will take some time until we can cover most of their functionality. I don't think providing support for plugins at this point (specially for such type of basic functionality) would help as it also requires quite dev resources/time to implement and their functionality would be limited/restricted anyway. There's still improvements needed/coming to some basic areas that would make plugin dev a moving target for developers. There's also some considerations regarding Affinity file format (see Ben's comments about Affinity file format spec). JET_Affinity 1 Quote A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JET_Affinity Posted May 28, 2017 Share Posted May 28, 2017 ...providing support for plugins...requires quite dev resources/time...functionality would be limited/restricted...a moving target for developers. Among other problems. Mission-critical dependency upon third-party plug-ins is not something I'm interested in. Been there; done that. It's a model that I consider passé. Far more valuable to me is a full-blown user scripting implementation (which, as I recall, has been mentioned in the development plans), preferably JavaScript based. (FreeHand's Graphic Find & Replace has yet to be equaled in any mainstream drawing program, by the way.) JET rui_mac 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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