Hi Jeff, thanks for the feedback, putting it on this thread is fine.

The behavior of groups in MOI is modeled after 2D vector drawing programs like Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, etc... because they have had groups for a long time and there is a lot of consistency for how they behave.

So usually to answer group behavior questions I check several 2D illustration programs and if they all agree that I try to do that as well.

Also I should mention that although groups are the first kind of hierarchical structures in MOI I expect to add others in the future like probably "folders" which will be able to have different behavior than groups.


> - Selecting an item in a group - best done from the Objects list, or click twice
> on the object - once to select the group an then another to select the object in
> the group. I can live with that but would rather just select the object in the
> group. If I want to select the whole group, then I can do that form the object list.

Well it's kind of the #1 purpose of groups that they make a set of objects all select and transform as one unit.

That's very uniform behavior in all 2D vector drawing apps that I have seen.

Note that in addition to additional clicks stepping into the hierarchy you can also do a Ctrl+click.

When you hold down Ctrl and click on an unselected object that is inside of a group that object will get individually selected with that single click no matter how many nested levels.


> Transform-Mirror. If I select an object in the group, and mirror it, the mirrored
> copy is created outside the group. I would expect it to remain in the group so
> that I don't have to move it back into the group. This one I find quite annoying.

At first I thought you meant mirroring a selected group should make a result with both pieces inside of the same group. But you mean when there is a child of the group selected?

I'll have to test that in some other programs.


> - You can create two groups with the same name (copy/paste).

I just tested this with Affinity Designer, Inkscape, and Microsoft Word, all of them have the same behavior, no change in names after copy/paste.

If trying to do that it seems like you could get a lot of "copy of copy of copy of" pretty quickly in the names.


> Within a group, select an object. Turn off visibilty for all other objects in the
> group. Export the selected object (in my case to STL). When the export
> completes, all object in the group become both visible and selected.

This is a bug from the export process being done before groups existed so it was ok back then to only save and restore hidden and selection properties on the top level objects. I've almost got it fixed up.

Thanks, - Michael