Image Credit: Marc Connolly – Flickr
Next to the colour change of the User Interface, one of my favorite enhancements to AutoCAD 2015 is the new lasso selection method. Haven’t used lasso yet? You are missing out.
With the lasso selection you click and hold the left mouse button then move around the screen creating an irregular shape around your objects. As this creates a lasso like shape, you can imagine where the name comes from. It works great for those areas where a rectangular selection is just too rectangular to get just the objects you want, when you have a bunch of objects to select and a lot that you don’t want to select.
If you’ve used many of the Adobe products, like Photoshop, this will be very familiar to you. It also reminds me a lot of the sketch command that was used to digitize maps.
It also works like the standard rectangular selection in that you can do both crossing and window selection (window only selects what’s completely inside the selection, crossing is anything inside the selection AND is crossed by the selection). You can also use the new spacebar toggle to switch between crossing, window, and fence. Fence changes the selection method to only select objects crossed by the shape, works well when you have a series of objects to select but don’t want any of the overlapping or objects that are near.
Lasso got me thinking, how many different ways are there to select a line? Challenge accepted
- I can just straight out pick the line
- I can window select the line (both window and crossing)
- I can window-polygon or crossing-polygon select it. These two are a couple hidden “gems”. If you start a command, for example erase, type either WP or CP and you can make polygonal selections
- Fence… another, sort-of “gem” in that any time AutoCAD wants to make a selection you can type F to initiate the fence selection. Fence is not just for Trim and Lasso
- Select All would select everything in the drawing including the line
- Using Select Similar I could select a line with the same properties, right-click, and use Select Similar to select all lines in the drawing with the same properties
- Building a Quick Select set I could select all lines in the drawing, or all lines in the drawing that are on the layer of the line I’m after
- I could use FILTER to select all lines in the drawing or all the lines on a particular layer.
I’ve got that feeling that I’m missing a selection method or two…. any ideas?
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