Comment 34 for bug 196453

I also find this very annoying to have to do boring stuff (multiple tabs, select through the XML editor or the find dock, provided one knows the id or label, etc.) to select an invisible object. There are many good reasons why one might want to use invisible objects.

- A very common usage is to transform a text to path while still keeping the original text object hidden below, allowing modification (I saw a conference of someone making images for Wikipedia and using this trick).

- Another is to make icons and have an invisible rectangle behind your icons to delimitate the icon border. This is not the same as using the viewBox since this way you can make a single file with many icons, and you later crop each icons individually with a script. This technique is used by GNOME designers for instance who design icon sets in a single SVG file delimitating each icon with a square.

I would propose to at least add a checkbox option for allowing this capability in the "Selecting" tab of the preferences.