Is there a way to select everything – in one fell swoop – in an open glyph’s active layer? I can’t find a way of getting the outlines, the anchors, the guides, and the hinting in one go. Is it possible?
Repeated ⌘A offers different selections: all paths, all shapes and anchors, all hints, all guides, all anchors.
If you want a custom selection, then that would probably be best handled with a script that modifies Layer.selection to contain the desired classes of objects.
1 Like
Okay. I’ll look into that.
NB: It would be – perhaps – an idea to make something like ‘paste special’, a ‘select special’ on Opt+Cmd+A
Getting tight with shortcuts here. Opt-Cmd-A is assigned to Deselect All already.
Perhaps the better question: What do you need it for?
In this case I have four files going where some layers of some glyphs need to be close to existing glyphs but not the same. So I copy layers around and it is a hassle to manually select all the things to copy in one go.
Paste Special may help you.
What’s the use-case for Deselect All?
Many potential use cases. E.g. you want to apply a filter to the whole layer, not just a part of it, so you need to achieve a situation where you have nothing selected.
Right but my thought is that a click well away from everything accomplishes that more easily. But I guess keyboard-focused users might disagree?
If you click anywhere thats not an object you deselect everything. Seems more reasonable to assign it to Select ALL.
That would require to switch from the keyboard to the mouse, perhaps move the mouse before clicking (and potentially move right back to the keyboard again).
Secondly, this strategy does not work in Font view.
Thirdly, Deselect All is a standard entry in Edit menus on the Mac. See for yourself, e.g., in Pages.
If you don’t use Deselect All, you could remap its keyboard shortcut to use ⌥⌘A for your select-all-I-need script.
That would be a solution since I have never used ‘Deselect all’ in any application at any time.
I also thought of ways to change function of repeated Cmd+A. Is the Shortcut Cmd+Shift+A used? If not then the normal function of Cmd+A pressed multiple times, could be extended so that pressing Cmd+Shift+A would only add to the selection, instead of Cmd+A which selects first outline, then outlines and anchors, then deselect everything and only selects unlocked guides (or whatever it does).
Cmd+Shift+A is used for aligning the selection, an absolutely vital shortcut.
1 Like
We’re gonna need a larger keyboard.
2 Likes