I'm literally just going tot copy/paste a suggestion from ages ago that's been put on "backlog" because the last response from Adobe was from 2017 and it's 2020.

"Okay if you have more than one layer...let's say 50 and I need to select 20 of them. Why can't someone select them with a single click instead of selecting every single layer? With shift selected I can mark more than one but they aren't selected. Same thing for sublayers and so on."

To elaborate, we need a better way to Shift+select numerous target layers without having to select each one-by-one. Right now you can only select one at a time, which is insane. This has been an issue for sooo long.

This used to be easy to do not too long ago, maybe CS2 or so, but they broke it at some point and have never fixed it. It's quite a statement on where Adobe's attention to customer satisfaction is when this is in the top 10 non-completed user submitted requests and is 3 years old without any follow-up....
231 votes at the time of this post * $10 a month for one app for 3 years = $83,160

Inaction is the new action. Apparently.

lol 2020 and still nothing?

2 YEARS! That's the last time someone requested that Shift + click allow us to span layers and select multiple at the same time. Please save us hundreds of hours by making this feature (available in Photoshop, Windows Explorer, and so many more) standard for Illustrator. PLEASE.

I'm pulling my hair out here, and as a balding man, that is not helping anyone.

This is so ******* frustrating! I had to look up for a way to multi-select layers and learn it's not possible?!?! Manually selecting each layer is so tedious.
How the **** is this not a feature? So much for a 'professional' tool.

What works for me is:

1. Alt/ Option - Click on 1 layer and create a group (Ctrl + G) with this layer.
2. Bulk-select the other layers that you need and drag it to the group that you just made.

Note that all the layers you just dragged into the group will come on top of the first layer with which you made the group.

I hope this helps. :)

This is why I've switched to Affinity Designer for 95% of my work

Seriously. Just did the update to 2020 and this STILL doesn't exist??? Throwing my hands up in despair!

Are you going to add this feature or not? Do you even pay attention to this thread?

is this **** going to be implemented or what wtf so ******

Get this "feature" ADOBE!!!!! for the love of god!

oh yes

goooooooooo idea maaaaan

To me it's obvious that Adobe has long abandoned the core development of Illustrator and Photoshop as they have super bloated code. It's easier to add more modern features separately (see curvature tool, freeform gradients, etc) than to fix the core tools and workflow.
So I guess they try to keep users paying (and frustrated, but they don't care about that) by adding 1 or 2 features every year while they are working on new tools that will eventually replace Illustrator and Photoshop. Just look how they desperately are trying to copy Affinity's products toolset and ideas. So they keep milking the users so that they can keep the shareholders happy while they build new tools like project Gemini.

You can do this easily, but it is not intuitive at all. You have to bulk lock all the layers you want to select. Then hit Ctrl + Alt + 2, and then only the layers you locked are selected. Very easy!

This post is over two years old, but yet this feature should have been present in Illustrator for decades!

Honestly, from an application development standpoint, is the underlying code so awful that selecting a range of layers via the Layers Palette (just like Photoshop) really that difficult?

Has Adobe really given up on AI and Photoshop? It seems like they have since they don't support most common features like this which has been a standard in other programs forever.

This is the way I get around this problem:
1. Make a new (arbitrary) layer
2. Shift+select the objects that you want to group
3. Move those objects to the new (arbitrary) layer
4. Select the new (arbitrary) layer bullseye
5. Ctrl+g

How is this coming along? Will it be available by 2020, Yogesh?