Select objects by type, e.g. select all text objects

[Pander]

Please offer a functionality to select all objects by one of the following type:
- text
- path (including rect, arc, spiral, star, etc.)
- path (excluding rect, arc, spiral, star, etc.)
- rect
- arc
- spiral
- star
- box3d
- bitmaps (both included and linked)

These have to be available in a submenu in the Select menu and all have keyboard shortcuts. They would also listen to select modifiers as shift and control. Especially the first two of the list are the most important to implement.

Some thought has to be given for selecting parts of grouped objects. This could sometimes be undesirable when working with a lot of imported object and some texts and lines in the current work on which this only should apply. Perhaps this should be a boolean setting in preferences with a well chosen default. I would suggest to set it *not* to select objects inside grouped objects.

Implementing this would allow for very fast selection of e.g. all text objects or all lines and rectangles in designs with many objects.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Select by type is already possible in 'Edit > Find…'.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

See also
<http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Select.html#Select-Find>

[su_v (suv-lp)]

> These have to be available in a submenu in the Select menu (…)

I would agree that the functionality of the 'Find…' dialog is too deeply buried (the dialog can't be docked (bug #592323) nor remembers the last used settings (bug #480847, bug #456180)). Personally I think an enhanced, dockable 'Find…' dialog is easier and more versatile to use (and allows quicker access to the various options than a submenu).

> (…) and all have keyboard shortcuts

There are already too few keys available - instead of adding individual shortcuts for all those select modes it would need to be assured that all modes do have verbs which would allow to map them individually to keyboard shortcuts if required by the user. They could be accessed using the normal shortcuts for menu commands ('Alt' + underlined character in the text of the menu item).

> selecting parts of grouped objects (…)

Maybe better discussed in bug #172127 “Optionally forbid selections outside working group”?

> (…) I would suggest to set it *not* to select objects inside grouped objects.

Your proposed default depends on your personally preferred workflow, but possibly not for others. At the moment the 'Find…' dialog is the only command that allows to recursively select objects across groups and layers, which is very useful IMHO e.g. when mass-changing certain attributes of a sub-set of objects without needing to know in which layer/group they are). Also, you already can limit the scope of the search (current selection|layer, include hidden|locked).

Overall related earlier feature requests:
Bug #170378 “Select All by Stroke or Fill Color” (plus duplicates)
Bug #171685 “Smart Select”

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

Attached is a patch that can select objects by type.

The idea is you select one or more objects on canvas and then from the menu Edit->Select Same->Object Type (or keyboard shortcut) , all objects of the same type (rect, ellipse, star, spiral, path, text, image, clone, offset supported) are selected.

Including (or not) hidden and locked objects are taken from user preferences (Inkscape Preferences->Behavior->Selecting). Groups are included.

[jazzynico (jazzynico)]

Patch tested on Windows XP, Inkscape 11562.
Works as expected except:
* Flowed text, not supported.
* Linked and dynamic offsets, not differentiated.

Regarding the user interface, the whole Select Same... menu would gain from being added to the context menu.

[Pander (pander)]

Nice that you are working on this. Can't wait to used it in the next release. Could you also come up with an keyboard shortcut for this that is based upon or derived from CTRL+A?

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

Committed to trunk as r11573
*Flowed text and Linked dynamic offsets should be working
* Select Same submenu added to the context menu
* Keyboard shortcut for Select Same->Object Type is "Shift+Alt+A"

[John Smith (john-smithi)]

@Pander, you may be able to download a "Development version" of Inkscape to try it out.
See http://inkscape.org/download/