Highlighting Selections in QGIS

I have been working a lot with points recently, and one thing with the default selection highlighting in QGIS is that selections do not really stand out. This is especially true with point layers.

A bit of an extreme example, but there are 15 points selected in the middle of this image.

hard_to_see

However, we can remedy this with the Expression Plus plugin (by Nathan Woodrow) and a rule based symbology.

plugin

This plugin adds a great function: isselected()

With this we can easily create rule to symbolise features that are selected.

The rule for symbology is as follows:

QGIS 2.12+:

isselected( @layer_name )

QGIS 2.8:

isselected( 'ACTUAL_NAME_OF_LAYER' )

So we can see that 2.12 has added a slightly more dynamic way of applying the symbology.

symbology

We can now slightly more easily see our selection.

more_visible

But one final setting. With symbol levels we can really make the selections pop.

symbol_levels

Symbol levels can be set from the bottom right of the styles tab, through rendering order. We simply want out selection to have a higher number than the other symbologies. Thus being rendered in a later pass and appearing on top.

final_selection

Much better.