What I'm looking for, and am stunned does not already exist in the mess of tools ArcMap has...
A tool to simply draw or select a polygon around an area containing lines, points & polygons, and use this new polygon to cut & delete features from multiple layers inside that polygon. Period. No new layers created.... the area inside the polygon is now empty... area OUTSIDE the polygon remains the same.
This would be different from existing tools - the erase and clip tools currently available create extra data (output classes) to juggle around.
In its simplest form, the way I see this being used:
- Dataset could have lines/points/polygons.
- User draws (or selects) cutting polygon, then selects this quick clip tool.
- Any visible line or polygon feature (within current edit session) which crosses the cutting polygon gets split at that edge.
- Afterwards, all features that are completely within cutting polygon are deleted.
- User can then easily perform other operations in that void area.
This is useful for data sets where the above clipping operation needs to be done multiple times... it doesn't always make sense to deal with new data sets being created each time an erase operation is run. In fact doing that and juggling all the layers can be a real waste of time.
