Hide and unhide all in Sketchup

When you only want to hide the edges of an object but don’t want to delete them, use the auto-hide all edges tool. In SketchUp itself, the equivalent native command is right-click > Hide (or the eraser with Shift held). Note the difference most users miss: Hide keeps the two faces on either side of the edge as separate, individually selectable faces — it does NOT merge them into a surface entity, unlike Soften/Smooth, which hides the edge and fuses the faces so clicking one selects both. If you want the line gone but the faces to stay independent, Hide is the correct choice.

Video tutorial:

Steps by steps:

• Click select object – click auto hide all edges
• Hidden object edges
• To show hidden object edges – click auto show all edges

  

To bring hidden edges back without a plugin, you need the right view toggle — and there are two of them. View > Hidden Geometry reveals hidden edges/faces as dotted lines, while View > Hidden Objects reveals hidden groups and components as a ghosted pattern; up through SketchUp 2024 these were independent switches, so you could expose hidden edges while still keeping whole objects hidden. Recent SketchUp 2026 releases have largely consolidated this behavior, so the two toggles no longer behave as distinctly as they once did — worth knowing if an old tutorial’s instructions don’t match what you see. A practical tip: once Hidden Geometry is on, you can select a previously hidden edge and right-click > Unhide to restore just that one, rather than unhiding everything at once.