Chapter 2: Basic Editing

2-1: Selection 2-1-5: Easy and Hard Selection

In a busy circuit, many objects may overlap, causing confusion when selecting. To simplify selection, objects can be marked so that they are no longer easy-to-select, which means that standard selection does not work on them.

To select hard-to-select objects, use the Toggle Special Select command (in menu Edit / Modes / Select). You can also click on the "Special Select" tool bar button to enable "special selection". Once in this mode, all objects are selectable.

Ease of selection extends to more than just nodes and arcs. There are four "classes" of objects that can be selected:

• Basic objects (all arcs, primitive nodes, and port names)
• Cell instances
• Node and arc text (names and other text placed on nodes and arcs)
• Instance names (an unexpanded cell instance's name)

By default, the first three classes are easy-to-select, and instance names are hard-to-select. If you uncheck "Easy selection of cell instances" in the Selection Preferences dialog, then cell instances become hard-to-select.

Although all nodes and arcs are typically easy-to-select, you can control them individually by unchecking the "Easy to Select" field in their properties dialog (use the Object Properties... command in menu Edit / Properties). If multiple objects are selected, the Object Properties... dialog has a popup on the right for changing their selection difficulty.

Special commands exist in the Selection menu for dealing with easy-to-select nodes and arcs. You can select all of the easy-to-select objects in the current cell with the Select All Easy command. Similarly, you can select those that are not easy-to-select with the Select All Hard command. To change the ease of selection for a set of objects, highlight them and use either Make Selected Easy or Make Selected Hard.

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