how do you show selected mesh in blender's outliner?

Question

I click on a mesh in the graphical window, and I see the mesh gets highlighted. I go to look at the Blender outliner and I cannot find the mesh. My blender file has 700+ components, and I cannot find the graphically selected object in the outliner. Is there a way to have the outliner automatically scroll to the selected mesh?

I see that there is a similar question answered on this website, but I do not have a number pad to use that answer, so I do not know how to use that solution. Is there a method to find the mesh in the outliner using the mouse, or some other alternative? I see this question as well, but that does not address the issue I am running into.

Answer 1

It is possible to filter the displayed objects in the Outliner by their state. Click on the filter icon and change the object state filter to Selected. The outliner should now only display the selected objects.

If the particular objects are deeply nested in collections and you don't want to step through the hierarchy, disable the Collection filter checkbox. This will display the objects without their collection hierarchy, just one after the other in the outliner.

Answer 2

In your preferences (Edit > Preferences) go to your Keymap Options, and under the Outliner section, scroll down to Show Active.

There you can change it to whatever key you want. Then, after selecting the object in the 3D viewport, hover over the outliner and press your key.

You can also change this Show Active key in many different workspaces such as the 3D viewport to instantly center the camera around the selected object. Though it might be called differently in some workspaces, for example in the 3D viewport it's called Frame Selected, so it might be beneficial to look for the key, not it's name.

Answer 3

If you don't want to mess with key bindings: Hover over the outliner, bring up the Menu Search, then search for Outliner -> Show Active.