The “iOS Foreground” object here is hijacking the hovering so you are measuring the distance to it.

I see. I thought it wouldn’t do this, since the layer is locked, but I see that it starts working when I actually hide that layer.

Yeah I don’t know why it works this way, I guess it makes more sense in some contexts when developers are inspecting elements (otherwise they won’t be able to inspect the locked ones maybe).

Yeah, you’d just expect it to work the other way around, so that holding command would allow them to measure to the locked objects. Or, the developer could just lock/unlock layers. But the command+opt measurement solves the problem, so it doesn’t really matter. Just less intuitive for n00bs like myself.

For developers the deep select is reverted (they need to hold cmd to not deep select) so for them it actually works the way you are expecting. That’s probably one of the reasons it was implemented this way.

Apologies to bump an old topic which is marked as solved, but how exactly are we supposed to solve the larger issue?

It’s not possible in my situation to hide all the layers that sit underneath the two objects that I would like to inspect. What would have made much more sense to me is if you hold the option key down, the measurement is made between the item that is selected and the item which is surrounded in purple signifying the item being hovered? Otherwise, if you have content which sits underneath items, you will never be able to measure between that content.