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I would like to select (for example) the boxes/arrow in the LHS of this example by drawing a bounding box with the selection tool to select multiple objects, is this possible?

So far I have tried drawing the bounding inside the outer square (red illustrates cursor selection)
 

This just selects and moves the outer square. I have also tried selecting from outside the box like
 


This selects the objects I want, but also selects the outer square. This seems fundamentally different to behaviour in excalidraw where selection would only select if an ENTIRE object was contained within the selection. I find this control to be much more useful. Is there anyway to configure this behaviour?

Selecting multiple objects with cmd+click is not scalable for more complex scenarios

Hi @davidmac, thanks for posting in the Lucid Community! Our selection tool is designed to highlight entire objects when only a portion is selected, so I would recommend using Frames or Containers to achieve this. All shapes that fall entirely within the frame or container will be moved with your frame or container. These shapes do not need to be grouped or connected within the frame or container. To demonstrate this behavior, I have included the GIF below:

Please let me know if you have any further questions!


Thanks for the reply! This seems to be close to what I am aiming for, but the typical use case is to use the selection in order to copy some subset of nested items to replicate elsewhere. When using the frame tool I can only see how to remove the items from the original.


Hi @davidmac, thanks for following up with that clarification! To select specific, nested shapes you can hold the Shift or Cmd/Ctrl key as you select your shapes like you mentioned earlier. However, if you have more complex diagrams, I would recommend clicking + dragging your selection tool over the shapes you would like to select, then you can hold Shift or Cmd/Ctrl and select the items that you do not want in your selection. From there, you can create a copy of those shapes. The Group feature may also come in handy as you create your diagrams, as you can group sets of shapes, which only require to click on any shape within the group to copy all shapes within the group. I hope this information is helpful!

I know these tips aren’t exactly what you described, but we’re very interested in your feedback and committed to continually improving our products. If you’re willing to share, we’d love to hear more details about your use case or what you’d like to see in this experience within this thread. I’ve also converted this post to an idea so that it’s visible to others within the Product Feedback section of the community - from here, they can upvote it and add details of their own.

Finally, for more information on how Lucid manages feedback via this community, take a look at this post:

Please let me know if you have any further questions!

 


Thank you! The shift+click to de-select works well for my use-case 


For complex diagrams with alot of nested objects, such as architecture diagrams, this limitation is painful enough that I’ve gone back to using PPT for my dagrams. I am unable to select the specific objects within a couple of nested boxes, and I can selected them individually because of where they are in the front/back positioning.  I’d like similar to how PPT lets you select shapes.