Editing inside a group

[MatthijsR]

Is there a way to access/open a group without ungrouping it and selecting ONLY inside that group? In other words, I want to be able to drag-select items inside a group without selecting any elements outside of the group.

[Dan C]

Hi MatthijsR

You can expand a group in the layers panel and select/drag only the grouped elements here. If I've misunderstood your question, please let me know!

[MatthijsR]

I wanted to use cross-selection on the artboard. So if I am on the artboard with let's say 2 groups on top of eachother. Now I want to use the cross selection to select elements from 1 group only. If they don't overlap, you can select with CTRL+drag select. But if the groups overlap, you will select elements from both groups.

If I could freeze everything on the canvas EXCEPT the elements of 1 group, I can select and edit safely inside that group without touching anything outside of the group.

The layers panel won't work with many elements in a group or elements that are not listed together (many, times CTRL+click)

[gdenby]

Select the group from which you don't want to select any object. Hide the group. That is, uncheck the group in the layer panel. After that, you can only select on screen what is visible.

[R C-R]

13 hours ago, gdenby said:

Select the group from which you don't want to select any object. Hide the group.

Or lock it.

[Zambetti]

All of these responses are tedious workarounds...

• Lock all siblings

• Hide all siblings

•.Hunt and peck what you need in the layer panel (often a very long list with tiny near-contextless thumbnails)

As mentioned in the original question, there should be some way to isolate a group for editing. (Maybe there is?)

[Old Bruce]

42 minutes ago, Zambetti said:

As mentioned in the original question, there should be some way to isolate a group for editing. (Maybe there is?)

Only work around I have come up with (I use this occasionally) is to select the group, copy and make a new document from the clipboard. Do my editing there and copy all and return, delete the group and paste the edited group.

Sadly this is good only in theory, practice shows up a lot of problems.

[thoughtcipher]

Not sure if this is still relevant. I came to this forum looking to solve this same issue. I ended up just switching my MOVE TOOL selection type to Layer instead of Default. That seems to retain my groupings but allows me to toggle grabbing any layers I need while pixel pushing. When I'm done working within my group, I just set it back to Default or Group.