Selecting Items
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There are several ways to select an item in Layout:
Click on the item in a viewport;
Click on the item’s name in the Scene Editor Panel (Scene Editor); or
Manually select the edit mode and then select the item from the Current Item pop-up menu. Note that you cannot select a locked item (a little lock icon appears next to name).
Use the Item Picker master plugin
You can select items in a viewport by clicking on any polygon edge rather than just on a pivot point.
You can use your Up and Down cursor keys to cycle through the Current Item list. All items, except objects, are highlighted in yellow when selected. When an object is selected, a dotted-yellow bounding box will appear around it. You can select a bone by clicking near its midpoint, rather than its pivot point, making it possible to pick different bones that branch from the same point in a hierarchy.
You can select multiple items of the same type, like all objects or all lights, and perform edits on them simultaneously.
If the toolbar command is a state-type command and the selected items have mixed settings, the button will be shaded diagonally. Clicking the button will toggle the state of the current item and make all other selected items the same. Clicking again will toggle the state of all items.
Pressing the apostrophe (‘) key launches a special selector dialog. Simply type-in a few characters that uniquely identify the desired item and click OK. You can select any type of item.
In Layout, one item is always selected. It becomes deselected when you select a different object.
A selection bounding box can be created by dragging your middle mouse button in any viewport.
Items whose points appear within the box will be selected, and if the Shift key is held down, the items will be added to the existing selected items, if they are the same type. If items of more than one type are within the box, preference is given to those items matching the current edit mode.
In addition to the viewports, this also works in other areas of the interface, such as the Graph Editor.
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Contributed by Richard Feeney