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Hide (command)Hide the selected objects; bring them back with the eye toggle.
Menu: Edit > Hide | In depth: The Layers panel
Hide takes the selection out of view without deleting anything. The objects are all still there, still in the Layers panel, still doing their jobs.
Cmd-3 is the shortcut, the same as Illustrator's.
It acts on the selection roots, so hiding a group hides the group as a whole rather than marking each member. The members disappear because their folder is hidden, which means unhiding the folder brings them all back in one action instead of one at a time.
Then it clears the selection, because a hidden object cannot be reached in the model view: leaving it selected would mean holding onto something you can no longer see or click. Bring it back with the eye toggle in the Layers panel, which is the same switch this command throws.
Anything already hidden is left alone, and hiding with nothing visible selected does nothing at all.
Hidden is still there
This is the useful part, and it is why hiding is a working tool rather than a tidying one.
A hidden object still snaps. The construction under a finished figure is usually hidden, and you can go on snapping to it while you build, which is exactly what makes a clean drawing workable rather than a dead end.
A hidden object still holds up everything built on it. Hide the two points that define a line and the line stays where it is.
A hidden object is still exported and still counted, so hiding is not a way to leave something out of a file. That is what selecting deliberately before an export is for.
Unhide All walks the whole tree and shows everything, at every level, with one deliberate exception: the helper groups that Straightedge and Compass retire their hosts into stay hidden. Those were put away by a tool rather than by you, and they are still live snap targets where they are.
For anything else, the eye in the Layers panel is the way back, and it reaches whichever level of the tree you hid.
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