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Select

Shortcut: none — it's the default. Esc (with nothing in progress) always returns to Select.

Select is for looking and picking, never for creating. Right-drag orbits, Shift+right-drag pans, the wheel zooms, clicking picks.

What you can pick​

  • Sketch points — endpoints, corners, circle centers. Points win over the edges they sit on.
  • Lines and edges — in sketches and on bodies. An edge picks together with every edge running smoothly out of it: a straight line that breaks into a tangent curve and leaves again as a tangent line is one click, and so is the circular rim of a revolved body. The run stops at corners and where three edges meet. Hold Control for just the one edge.
  • Whole bodies — click any flat face of a body to select the body. Edges and corners win over the body they belong to.
  • Faces — of construction planes, and of bodies through the Selection Exploder.

You can't select things hidden behind a body.

Picking from a crowd — the Selection Exploder​

When a tiny vertex or edge is buried in a cluster of overlapping things, press Space and everything under your cursor fans out into spaced-apart handles you can pick without guessing. See Selection Exploder for the full walkthrough.

Resizing a construction plane​

A selected construction plane shows a grip on two opposite corners; drag either one to resize its rectangle.

Materials​

With bodies selected, the context pane's Material dropdown says what they're made of. Every document starts with a palette to choose from — Unobtainium first, then Blue, Green, Red and the rest, each contrasting with the one before — and a new body is Unobtainium until you pick something else. New material… adds one; its Name and Colour are editable right below, and every body using it re-renders.

A body extruded off another body's face is made of the same material as that body.

Selection feeds the other tools​

Most tools act on the selection: select two lines and Constraint's Parallel lights up; select a line and press D to dimension it; select edges and press F to fillet. Shift+click adds to a selection.

The Elements pane mirrors the selection and offers three views — list, tree, and a dependency graph.

Reviewing the selection​

The context pane's element picker summarizes the selection by kind (e.g. 2 ⟨line⟩ · 1 ⟨body⟩); click it to list each element, remove any, or Clear all. Every tool that gathers elements uses this same control — see Selecting things.

With nothing selected, the context pane holds the document's Default units. Delete removes the selection; N jumps to the name field for renaming.

Help​

The Select tool's Context pane, each field explained