[Plugin] Selection Manager

[dominikh]

I want to announce my first public plugin for SketchUp, the Selection Manager.

Now, before I start describing it, I have to say that I was very surprised that there was no such plugin yet; means that if there actually is one, please let me now...

Description:
The purpose of Selection Manager is to be able to save named selections and recall them later, even after restarting SketchUp and reloading a model.

Features:

• keep multiple, named selections around
• Modify saved selections by adding/removing new entities to it
• Automatically update a saved selection if parts of it get deleted
• Save and load selections with/from the model

Usage:
The plugin adds a new sub menu to the context menu, called "Selection Manager". This menu contains the following items:

• Add new selection -- Asks for a name under which to save the selection. If the name is already in use, the user gets asked whether the existing one should be replaced or extended.
• Load selections from model -- Loads saved selections from the model. See the caveats section for more information.

Additionally, the menu has one sub menu per saved selection, which features the following items:

• Select -- Recalls the saved selection
• Add to selection -- Adds the current selection to the saved selection
• Remove from selection -- Removes the current selection from the saved selection
• Remove -- Completely remove the saved selection. Warning: There is no confirmation dialog.

Caveats:

• Loading the selections from a model can take some time. My tests, with ~70k entities and a couple of selections, took between 0.5 and 1 seconds.
• The selections get saved as attributes on the entities. To avoid copying those when copying an entity, the attributes will only be set temporarily during saving; they will also get removed as soon as "Load selections from model" has been used. That means that the selections should be loaded right after opening the model and that they cannot be loaded again, without opening the model again.

Installation:
Just download the attached .rb file and place it right in the Plugins\ directory.

---

selection_manager.rb

[Gaieus]

Sounds great, thanks!

@dominikh said:

...I was very surprised that there was no such plugin yet...

Well, actually there is one (more exactly two versions of it, a free and a commercial):
http://www.smustard.com/script/SelectionMemory
and
http://www.smustard.com/script/SelectionMemory2

But now yours seem to somehow compete with the commercial plugin.
(so downloading it quickly in case you revoke it)

[dominikh]

Ah, I was aware of SelectionMemory, but only being able to manage one selection set kind of defeated the point. I didn't know the second one, but it doesn't say if it can save them in the model, and I don't exactly like the UI -- Glad I didn't waste my efforts

@unknownuser said:

so downloading it quickly in case you revoke it

Haha, don't worry, that won't happen Seeing tools like TOS, EBBy* and co being free, I won't charge for something as simple as managing selections

[Gaieus]

Nay, that was just a joke of course.

Anyway, probably your plugin is different so those are just "similar" in concept then. Also, they are fairly old plugins and though I do not know much about scripting, I know that many things are possible now that were not in the past.

[Ben Ritter]

Dominikh,

thank you very much for sharing.

[xrok1]

Thank you

[barakuda]

I love it. Thank you very much for this plugin. I missed it too much. This plugin means end of frustration cause by incidental deselection during my work.

[barakuda]

I was not able to find out why saving or loading from model does not work. I saved the selection, saved model in SU8 and then I close and open the model. Then I checked the Manager menu but nothing loaded. I select Load selection from model, but still nothing happened (no sub-menu generated). Do you know if loading (after the file was closed and opened again) works in SU8?

[ASistGar]

Hi there! I installed the selection manager on my SU 2017 but no menus are displayed, so I can't use the tool like many have sucessfully done! Please help!

[filibis]

You access the plugin by right clicking entities then choosing Selection Manager. (Right click = context menu)

[Einstein]

Hi!
When you create a selection set, then delete entities included in the set, then undo that deletion, the memory of selection is cleared, even though the geometry "came back" to your model.
But it's a very nice extension, anyways. Thanks a lot