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Modeling - Editing

Selecting objects

Click, shift-click, and marquee-drag to select geometry, plus smart commands that pick free points and roots for you.

Basic selection

Click any point, edge, or shape to select it. What you pick lights up so you can see exactly what the next command will act on.

  • Click: select a single object, replacing whatever was selected before.
  • Shift-click: add to (or remove from) the current selection, so you can build up a set of objects one at a time.
  • Marquee drag: press on empty space and drag a box to select several objects at once.

The marquee behaves differently depending on which way you drag:

  • Drag to the right (window select, shown as a solid box): selects only objects that fall entirely inside the box.
  • Drag to the left (crossing select, shown as a dashed box): selects any object the box touches, even partially.

Marquee selection: a solid blue window box (dragged left to right) grabs only fully-enclosed objects, versus a green dashed crossing box (dragged right to left) that grabs anything it touches.

Tip

Use a rightward window drag when you want just the things fully enclosed, and a leftward crossing drag when you want to sweep up everything a loose box brushes against.

Locked objects are skipped

A locked object can't be selected on the canvas. Clicking it, dragging a marquee across it, and Select All all pass it by, so a locked background or reference shape never gets swept into a selection you didn't mean. To get it back, unlock it from its row in the Layers panel.

Smart selection commands

Beyond clicking, Locus can work out a meaningful selection for you. These live in the Select menu and the command palette.

Select Free Points

Selects every free point in your construction - the hand-placed control points you can actually drag. It deliberately skips points that are locked down by their role: points managed by a node, derived points (like an intersection or a point gliding on a curve), and points owned by another object (imported SVG vertices, reference-image handles, and the like). Hidden free points are included too.

The usual reason to run it: grab all your free points at once, then scale, to resize an entire construction in a single move.

A triangle built from three free points, which Select Free Points grabs (blue filled discs); a derived point inside it stays a hollow grey ring and is skipped, because its position is driven by other objects.

Select Roots

Start from a selection, and this walks back through each object's history to find its roots - the foundational pieces everything else is built on. Two kinds count as roots: your hand-placed free points, and any object resting directly on imported SVG geometry (the pieces you'd target to cut a construction free from its SVG). The SVG vertices themselves are treated as the floor and are never selected.

Where Select Free Points grabs every free point for scaling, Select Roots grabs only the roots reachable from the sub-tree you started with.

The construction that builds a square from two free points A and B: the line between them, a perpendicular through A, a circle centered on A through B, a perpendicular at B, C where the perpendicular through A meets the circle, a perpendicular at C, and D where that meets the perpendicular at B. A segment runs from A to D and crosses the circle at E, and the small circle at the end of the chain is drawn from D out to that crossing. C, D and E are hollow blue, because they are computed and Select Roots skips them. The small circle is the selection, in red, and Select Roots has walked the whole history back to A and B, the only free points it rests on, which are red too.

Select Parents

Selects what the current selection is built from, one step back. A segment gives you its two end points. A circle drawn through three points gives you those three points. A tangent line gives the point it starts from and the circle it touches. A region gives its edges.

Select Children

Selects what is built directly on the current selection, one step forward. Select a point and you get the segments, circles and arcs that use it. It is the exact reverse of Select Parents.

Four panes of the same construction, with an arrow between each, showing Select Parents walking up the chain one press at a time. In the first only the small circle is red. In the second the two points it was drawn from, D and E, have turned red as well. In the third their own parents join: the two perpendiculars behind D, and the segment and the big circle behind E. In the fourth C, the perpendicular through A, the line, and the free points A and B are all red too. Nothing ever goes back to grey, so the last pane holds the whole chain.

Four panes of the same construction, with an arrow between each, showing Select Children walking down the chain one press at a time, the reverse of Select Parents. In the first only the free point A is red. In the second everything built directly on it joins: the line, the perpendicular through A, the big circle and the segment to D. In the third the perpendiculars at B and C and the points C and D join. In the fourth E and the small circle complete it. As with Parents, each press adds and nothing is dropped.

One step at a time

Neither command walks the whole tree. Each run moves exactly one step, so run it again to walk another: press Return, or right-click on blank canvas. That is how you reach a grandparent: run Select Parents twice. Select Roots is still the way to go all the way back in one move.

Both add to the selection rather than replacing it. What you already had stays selected and the next step piles on top, so walking back two steps leaves you holding the whole chain.

Like Select Roots, both reach hidden objects. The construction under a drawing is often hidden, and a command that skipped it would give you the wrong answer rather than a shorter one.

A group is a folder, not a dependency. Select Parents on an object does not give you the group it sits in, and Select Children on a group does not give you its members. The Layers panel is where that relationship lives.

Dimensions, guides and imported outline geometry have no parents. They refer to other objects, but nothing depends on them, so Select Parents on a dimension comes back with nothing.

When there is nothing to find, the selection is left alone and the status line says so. Select Parents on a hand placed free point is the ordinary case: there is nothing behind it, and that is what makes it a root.

Select Same

Six commands that take what you have picked and extend the selection to everything else in the drawing that matches it in one respect. They sit together in the Select menu and behave alike, so the differences between them are small and the shared rules matter more.

  • Same Type matches the kind of object. Lines, rays, circles and arcs each count as their own type rather than all reading as curves.
  • Same Fill Color and Same Stroke Color match one color each, and only look at objects that can carry that color.
  • Same Radius matches circles and arcs by radius, to four decimal places, so two circles built different ways still match when they really are the same size.
  • Same Source matches everything a single Realize node made, which is how you grab one node-built batch out of a canvas holding several.
  • Same Style matches the whole look at once: fill, stroke, width and dash together. It is the one to reach for after Copy Style, since it finds exactly the set that a style swatch would have set.

The rules all six share

They replace the selection rather than adding to it. This is the opposite of Select Parents and Select Children, which pile on. Run Same Style and you are holding the matches, not the matches plus what you started from.

Something has to be selected first. With nothing picked there is nothing to match against, and the status line says so rather than selecting the whole drawing.

A mixed selection widens the net rather than narrowing it. Pick two objects styled differently and Same Style finds everything matching either one. It is a union, not an intersection, which makes "select one of each and extend" a quick way to gather several styles at once.

Objects that cannot carry the property are passed over. Same Fill Color ignores anything unfillable; Same Radius ignores everything that is not a circle or an arc. If nothing in your selection carries the property at all, the command says so and leaves the selection alone.

Hidden, locked and scaffolding objects are never matched. These commands work on what you can see and touch, exactly like a marquee drag, which is the one real difference from Select Roots and Select Parents: those two deliberately reach into hidden construction, and these six deliberately do not.

Note

Selection stays in sync everywhere. Whatever you pick on the canvas is reflected in the Layers panel and in the node graph, so you always see the same selection across the whole app.

< Previous: Constraining with Shift | Next: Transform tools >

Related

  • In the node graph: Select Outer Edges finds the perimeter of a tiled or arrayed field, ignoring every shared interior edge.
  • Mark as Seam: what that perimeter is usually fed into.

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