Most direct way to select the innermost group on Illustrator

Question

I have multiple groups of shapes in a hierarchy that goes several levels deep. Something like this:

Layer 1
    Group 1
        Group 11
            Shape 111
            Shape 112
        Group 12
            Shape 121
            Shape 122
    Group 2
        Group 21
            Shape 211
            Shape 212
        Group 22
            Shape 221
            Shape 222

Each time I need to add some effect to one of the innermost groups, say Group 11, I need to double-click my way through all the parent groups in the hierarchy. The problems is that after I save changes Illustrator losses the current group I'm editing and goes back to the top level of the hierarchy, Layer 1 in this case.

How can I quickly select one of the innermost groups? Is there a shortcut or something I can use?

Answer 1

Select it with the layers panel. Only normal selection will mark the layer not select it you need to select it with the round dot next to the object name.

Answer 2

As pointed out in the answer and comments by @joojaa, Illustrator doesn't support such feature, so one would have to write a script for this.

The following is a simple script for selecting the parent group of the current selection. There might be a couple of corner cases I didn't check but it works for me. Also the steps in this answer describe how to run the script with a keyboard shortcut.

SelectParent.jsx

// Select the parent of the current selection

if ( app.documents.length > 0 ) {
    var doc = app.activeDocument;

    if ( typeof doc.selection[0] !== 'undefined') {
        var parent = doc.selection[0].parent;

        if ( parent !== doc.selection[0] && typeof parent.layer !== 'undefined') {
            doc.selection = parent;
        }
    }
}

I didn't need Illustrator to load the script from the Scripts folder, but in case it's needed, the script has to be copied to that folder and its location depends on the version and platform used.