Right Oscar, I feel the same. My comment really wasn't sarcastic, I'm sad to see Adobe crumbling. And this uservoice thing... it's weird when you're asked for advice but the answers are so off that it feels like they actually don't want to hear from you. Actually it feels like they hate you. And I don't understand why.

By the way, thank you for soliciting input, Adobe reps. But this implementation is so brain-dead that you're going to have to expect scorn for it. I hope you guys read this and do the simple implementation we asked for.

I wonder what's wrong with Adobe that it takes them 5+ years to come up with such a terrible answer to that simple a problem in 2023. Are they understaffed? Busy working on something else? Become incompetent? Maybe they don't care? Have their programs become so bloated that it's become impossible to touch parts of the code without making everything explode? Maybe parts of the older code, core functions, have become obscure to present-day development teams? Maybe a bit of all of those? Honestly, I wonder.

@adobe could you please do like it is in all other apps in the universe. Please stop reinventing the wheel. Just make it drag to select.

@oscar true, very true. I really don't understand the Adobe's logic behind this. It's like they do everything to make users suffer.

Very disappointing. #2 is especially clueless, literally, since it's undiscoverable except by accident and will produce bafflingly inconsistent results by accident. If a user's art makes dragging up from right to left more convenient once in a while, the application will behave differently for no apparent reason.

#1 requres the user to press and hold an extra key over and over and over, every damned time he selects something in the app. This is THOUSANDS of tedious extra presses per project. WHY? Other vector programs simply have a toggle in preferences to make this the DEFAULT selection mode, and have for DECADES. Corel Draw, Inkscape, Affinity Designer... it's so easy.

You should be able to toggle the mode, and make Option-drag use the other one. This is all we need, and would have been even easier to implement programmatically. Why wasn't this done?

Wow, this is mind-blowing it took 5 years to implement. Could you explain why such crucial feature took so long to implement?

Another example:

Here's what correct behavior might look like. Only I'm suggesting we do the opposite: from left to right - touch selection, and from right to left - full frame hit. Top down or bottom up, it doesn't matter. And be sure to have different style frames. And don't forget to add an option to disable the feature in the settings.

P.S. There is no need to change the behavior of the 'Alt' key.

Great implementation! For those who work with montages of repeated elements, a similar function is essential! I can't wait to try it

WOW! Thanks for the update. You must understand when, and I do presume to speak for the community, I say we'll believe it when we see it.

However, contrary to the specific suggestion here: Please make this a PERSISTENT selection mode we can activate, not a clumsy hotkey- or direction-based option we have to do every. damned. time.

AI lacking this crucial feature just makes me angry.

This is such a crucial feature for efficiency I can't understand how its not been implemented yet. Mind blowing.

Illustrator is abandonware. You should simply pirate it, since it's unsupported.

i wanted (and asked) this in 2006, hehe
they will never implement it

Granted, programs like AutoCAD are super clunky and outdated, but Adobe could learn a ton from them. There are a lot of quality-of-life features like this missing from Ai.

Sure Ai should have it.

Meanwhile, there is Super Marquee Tool from the AstuteGraphics plugin pack that allows to do exactly that and much more. If you need this right here and now, I suggest trying this solution.

@Szasz-Fabian Jozsef it's like talking to deaf and blind people, there is no hope in Adobe.

Selecting objects that are touched by the selection marquee is extremely dumb. I don't know why Illsutrator, inDesign and other Adobe software designers find useful to selected EVERYTHING that is touched.
Please learn from Corel or CAD applications - the user must be able to select objects that are INSIDE the selection marquee.
In order to select some objects in Illustrator or inDesign, the user has to make all kind of tricks and has to struggle every day, because the selection method is too simple and dumb.
Why is so dumb? Because it allows only one way - drag a selection marquee. Take this example from Corel:
- Simple selecting selects objects inside the marquee
- Alt-selecting selects objects touched by the marquee
- Starting the selection with Alt and finishing without Alt selects the objects inside the marquee, WITHOUT moving the object that is under the cursor where the selection marquee started
- Alt-clicking allows to select the objects BEHIND the topmost object.
Adobe products know only the fraction of the features mentioned above, therefore has the worse UX when selecting.

Dear Adobe, it has been years since users have required this feature. Please check this old thread where people have to struggle with plugins or scripting to perform this basic feature. This thread is more than 8 years old.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/how-to-select-only-objects-within-a-selection-marquee/td-p/3479810/page/4