Mark, I completely forgot to say there is a plugin now to do quite the thing you proposed, FindReplace Art from AstuteGraphics plugin pack. A commercial one, extremely handy in complex searches.
Please try it, if you never did.

Hi Egor!

Sounds highly familiar – lots of key bindings for various ‘Select Same’ commands, lots of time juggling between them, and locking and hiding unwanted stuffs. I also use a bunch of scripts for selecting text by size and by typeface (although that’ll be better once they roll out the fix for the bug that brakes actions containing scripts). Though it starts off manageable the extra complexity means extra time wasted on extra selection malarkey.

I work on large, detailed illustrated system maps where all the objects relate in a conceptual taxonomy. Hacky work-arounds (eg. giving objects subtly unique colours or appearance attributes) don’t cut it (and are so annoying anyway).

Having the ability to fine-tune selections, for example by object type and by appearance attribute, would be a real blessing. Even more so if we could define our own labels for object types and add them into the searches…

If I get a moment this week I’ll mock up an example for what this might look like.

Cheers,
Mark

Grouping selecting routines in palette — this is fresh. I personally have a lot of F-keys attached to 'Select same' commands. I used to juggle these to get what I want, locking and hiding art I don't need. It looks like this: I won't need text, select all text and lock, then I won't need whites, select bu fill, lock, then all reds, same fill, lock, then unlock all, select inverse, lock, have whites, text and red unlocked... and so on. When you have only these tools, I quickly learn how to select what you want, but some smart selection base on appearance would be nice too. Corel Draw have more powerful search engine, but it's SO slow in preparation! dozen of dialogue windows, not interactive and frightening.
Saving selection in AI is possible, but mostly unusable and hardly manageable. At least Layers could have tags to show which object in which selection. Or there could be a list of selection sets with list of objects.

Ah right - it's valuable to me because I spend all day in Illustrator working on very large, complex compositions which require frequent alterations, and I currently spend a lot of time clicking on bits in order to change appearances or apply transformations etc.