Wishes
Post your wishes about Graphisoft products: Archicad, BIMx, BIMcloud, and DDScad.

Prevent locked objects from being selectable

Professor Pickle
Advocate
When working with a busy model it is often difficult to select the right object/element. Tabbing through the available selection candidates sometimes doesn't work and it takes a bit of zooming in and out to finally get at the right thing.

Other times we have some objects whose shape and position has been set and locked and they won't change. Selecting those elements doesn't make sense most of the time.

It would be really helpful if there was a way to disable selection of locked items. This of course would be a toggle option of the selection process.
Pushing the boundaries of local time/space continuum since 1972.
Archicad 26 | iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) | 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 | 24 GB | Radeon Pro 580 8 GB | macOS 12.6


20 REPLIES 20

For this reason I generally work with the terrain mesh layer off, or with it on it's own story.

AC22-23 AUS 7000Help Those Help You - Add a Signature
Self-taught, bend it till it breaksCreating a Thread
Win10 | R5 2600 | 16GB | GTX1660 
Karl Ottenstein
Moderator

It's too bad that the poll is gone (it is on the old archicad-talk forum), but at least according to Minh this is #11816 in the wishlist database...

 

I find tabbing fine...but I, too, would like locked elements not to show up in the tab sequence = the original wish of locked being not selectable.

 

It seems to me (at his moment anyway) that the only reason to 'select' a locked element would be to use it to populate the Find & Select fields... but that can be done with the eyedropper.  And speaking of the eyedropper, that could still be used to pick up the tool and element settings even if the locked element could not be selected just by eyedropping over a hotspot... which is a non-selecting operation.  Similarly, drawing a selection marquee around elements that include locked elements should just ignore the locked elements.  At least that's my interpretation of the 2 year old wish, which I think would be useful. 🙂

 

And, then the issue of needing to select to unlock... as Tomek said, you untoggle the 'locked elements are selectable/or not' toggle .... which I see as being very similar to the 'suspend groups' button.  I could see an icon of a padlock with hotspots around it for the locked items are/are not selectable.

 

One of the forum moderators
AC 27 USA and earlier   •   macOS Ventura 13.6.6, MacBook Pro M2 Max 12CPU/30GPU cores, 32GB

yes of course, but in a certain moment i have to switch on the layer...and is a mess only moving the cursor...

runxel
Legend

This is one of the things that bewildered me the most when I started with Archicad.

I think AC is the only program to ever have this quirk. Very unnatural, I have to say. Also makes the onboarding process for new users difficult.

Lucas Becker | AC 27 on Mac | Author of Runxel's Archicad Wiki | Editor at SelfGDL | Developer of the GDL plugin for Sublime Text |
«Furthermore, I consider that Carth... yearly releases must be destroyed»

You know what would be really awesome? If GS published at least a read-only list of all the wishes in their secret squirrel database. Wish #11816 doesn't mean anything at all. Being able to see the wishes that have been selected though, now that would be something.

Pushing the boundaries of local time/space continuum since 1972.
Archicad 26 | iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, 2017) | 4.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7 | 24 GB | Radeon Pro 580 8 GB | macOS 12.6


As i speculated somewhere else the number is a formality; the real method is putting the list on a wood board and throw dards on it (with eyes closed).  Then see which wishes were hit and then work on other things. 

 

I would really like to work with snapable (when using other tools) but unselectable locked layers. Would speed up lots of things.

 

DGSketcher
Legend

Had another room in roof job to do the other day. I needed to see the part of the roof below the cut plane, but still ending up picking lines that are cut and not visible. Job took twice as long as it needed to. 😠

Apple iMac Intel i9 / macOS Sonoma / AC27UKI (most recent builds.. if they work)
bvd
Contributor

This would be particularly useful, especially dealing with reno's and existing structures. I want to draw the existing then lock them and not touch them, but still see them and be able to snap to them. Not accidentally select them when working with something adjacent. Locking floor slabs / remove selection would also be ideal, turning them on when required. I appreciate there is a quick selection toggle, but prefer selecting walls etc in their area as opposed to zooming into a corner which is often shared by other elements, initiating a tab sequence. 

At a fundamental level, the reasons you would want to select a locked layer are far outweighed by the reasons not to, in my opinion.

bvd
Contributor

bvd_0-1705647090639.png


Looks like you can take them off your pop up. couldnt find a way to make them void from selection 

 

 

mthd
Mentor

I wonder if there is a way to create a special selection gravity cut plane. One horizontal and one vertical and we can set it where we want when creating and editing elements. Only elements cut by the plane can be selected when this cut plane is turned on. Just another of my crazy ideas.

 

Turning elements off and on will not help when you need these elements to show up as reference. I think this is probably why many use Trace & Reference where possible. I think I need to brush up on T&R.

AC8.1 - AC27 ARM AUS + CI Tools
Apple Mac Studio M1 Max Chip 10C CPU
24C GPU 7.8TF 32GB RAM OS Ventura