In Slime, most of the supplied actions (menu commands, toolbar buttons) work on a selection of multiple shapes. There are several ways to select shapes, which are described below.
It is important to realize, that nearly in all Slime UML actions a selection is necessary; e.g. if you press the autolayout button, nothing will happen, because it only respects the shapes selected.
There are a couple of Select-Actions (Menu Entries); Select-All does only select shapes, because often you want to change all shapes in a diagram at once; e.g. show all methods.
Other actions can be used to select all direct and indirect sub- and superclasses of selected shapes; you can select some inheritance hierarchy easily.
The Selection Cursor can be used to select shapes in several ways:
Most menu/toolbar commands work on a selection; nearly all take multiple selections as well; thus you can efficiently set multiplicities on associations by selecting all associations with same multiplicity and then select the right multiplicity in the properties view; it is applied to all selected associations.
Similarily you can apply auto-layout only to a part of a diagram.
If only one Shape is selected, you can directly change its associated text by starting typing. The next/previous shape (ordered left-to-right, top-down) can be selected by using arrow-left/arrow-right. To go into a container shape, press Alt-arrow-down, to leave it press Alt-arrow-up.
If you want to move something around, select more than the shapes visible on the screen, just place your mouse very close to the border while dragging. The diagram will autoscroll after a few delay.