yeah exactly

Look no further than After Effect's ability to parent layers independant of where they exist on the layer stack.

'Save selection' lacks the former's ease of use and flexibility.

The group/ungroup like indesign is fine, and should probably be added—but for my work, I feel like linking layers is more useful. I am a motion designer and work with a lot of character rigs which are built in illustrator and then different pieces are separated onto different layers (like for example, the bicep is separated from the forearm, which is separated from the hand, etc) in preparation for rigging and animation in after effects. For things like hair, there is usually a layer(s) for the hair that's in front of the head and layer(s) for the hair that is behind the head. If I want to adjust the placement of the hair, it would be great to be able to have the front hair layer linked to the rear hair layer so that I can select and move them together and not have to go through a tedious process of selecting the layers that I want to move, or saving/loading a selection every time. In the case of limbs, linking would be super useful so that I can more easily adjust a pose— since each section is on its own layer and occasionally has other layers in between, would be much easier to select one of the linked layers and reposition vs having to manually select them all or load a saved selection.

As I mentioned before, my main complaint about the saved selection is that its too cumbersome to be useful. Being able to click visually with the cursor on an object and have all of the other objects be linked to it when transforming is way more user friendly than having to go thru the process of saving a selection and then trying to find it in a list of named selections.

Think of it like this: Say I want to open an image file that's on my desktop. Using the finder on a mac to visualize folders and files to just click on the image to open it is WAY easier than using the top menu > go > go to folder > type in a filepath like /users/username/desktop/image.jpg

So in summary, I'd say there are different 3 features here:
1. Save/load selection (which could be improved by adding it to the contextual right-click menu)
2. Ungroup remembers layers
3. Linking layers

Hi, the answer to what we cannot do is simple. We cannot ungroup grouped objects to the layers they where were before grouping.

What is asked is to reproduce what we can do in InDesign. In ID, we can group objects from different layers, and in the layers panel we have the option to ungroup keeping the original layers, or not.

As mentioned before (but as you ask for examples I will repeat it), here is a case where "save selection" does not help: Freehand had this functionality ages ago and it was great if you, for example, wanted to create a sheet of stickers, each sticker with a cut layer, a graphics layer, a text layer, etc., you could then group one sticker, duplicate it across the page, arrange, resize and align those duplicates if you want, and in the end ungroup and everything is on it's original layer again.

Hi Saurav,

I would say it has a similar functionality, but it feels like a significant work-around, which is more tedious and requires selecting objects to make a conscious choice. So, the specific functionality that I would expect is to speed up my workflow, not overcomplicate it.

Hi all,

Just to clarify 'Completed' doesn't means the UV is 'Closed', it simply means the UV is available publicly in the GA builds. The UserVoice platform doesn't allow us to have a intermediate status hence the confusion.

We are currently gathering all the user feedbacks and working on a plan to address them.

Thanks for your understanding.

I feel like this should not be marked as complete. The ability to save a selection is fine, but that is a different feature/does not solve the user story.

I want to be able to click ONCE to select a group on my artboard with my mouse and move it around and have it contain layers that are not in sequential order in the layer stack.

The save selection requires the user to select the objects > select menu > save selection > name it > save (like 5 clicks) then if I want to actually use it, I then need to go to select menu > name of the selection (2 clicks) just to select the objects (7 clicks total!). And what if I have a bunch of these selections, then I need to dig thru the list and try to remember what I named it instead of just clicking the object/group I want on the artboard. Not to mention, the save selection/saved selections don't appear in the contextual right click > selection menu.

Please re-open this

Linked layers like Photoshop seems like the most equivalent/useful to me.
Can even link two groups together

What Mathijn said. That should be the perfect way. That was also the behaviour of Macromedia Freehand ages ago and it just worked fine. Grouping objects from different layers, then treat them as if they were one object for duplicating, arranging, etc. and when finished, ungroup again and everything switches back into place.

What I'd like is just the same functionality as InDesign. Grouping with memory, the group will be in one layer, but when you degroup, the selected elements go back to their original layers.

Perhaps you can even make an optional function with a checkmark box somewhere in the settings menu, just in case people prefer the current situation more.

It is useful but the grouping across layers would be so much more useful and simpler for the end user

Save selection isn't the functionality that we need, grouping objects on different layers is what's needed.

this is not a solution for what was asked for in the O.P.

This isn't what I had in mind for "Grouping / linking objects from different layers".

What you guys need to add is a proper ability to parent layers. This is already done in After Effects and most 3D software.

How does this vary from the old save selection option?

Grouping items and they all move to a single layer can be useful but is mostly frustrating

Saved Selections is not the same... For example: in Freehand I could group objects from different layers, duplicate, rearange, resize, align, etc. them and after that I could ungroup them and everything was in place (on the original layers) again. With saved selections I can not (for example) allign duplicates of those selections to each other as illustrator will handle them as single objects.

Great to hear this is being worked on. I'll answer the questions I was sent in an email (can't see where to reply)
Do you use saved selections in your workflow?
I tried, but I am trying to create reusable components. E.g. Create button 1, button 2, then add them to tile A. Now I want to create multiple versions of this new objects, each one with some combination of these elements and extra objects. Personally, I want to create approximately 100+ objects. This quickly breaks saved selections as there is too many of them to make sense of. Plus I can't change the order of saved selections.

A few questions:
1) Will the linking of objects be based on a GroupItem entity?
2) Will the linking feature be added to the ExtendScript language?
3) Accordingly, will script and extension authors be able to interact with user linked objects? Or will the new feature break all previously created third-party scripts?

When programming scripts in Illustrator, there are containers based on groups (GroupItems). These include Clipping Group, a group that has a "clipped" attribute, and editable Compound Shapes, which place objects inside an invisible group. By the way, we cannot access objects inside compound shapes in scripting.