How to Union (Combine) Paths in Inkscape (Ctrl+Plus)

Pressing Ctrl+Plus (Cmd+Plus on Mac) with two or more overlapping objects selected merges them into a single combined path, removing any interior boundary lines where the original shapes overlapped — Inkscape's Boolean Union operation, and the direct equivalent of Illustrator's Pathfinder Unite. **What Union actually produces**: the result is one new path following the outer, combined outline of everything that was selected, as if the original shapes had been physically fused together into one continuous piece — any overlapping interior edges disappear entirely, leaving a single clean boundary rather than the original shapes' separate outlines still visible underneath. **Working with parametric shapes**: Union generally works on Rectangle, Ellipse, and other primitive shapes without needing to manually convert them to paths first, since Inkscape handles that conversion automatically as part of running the operation — worth knowing as a genuine convenience compared to some of the other Boolean operations and node-level edits covered elsewhere on this site, which do require an explicit Object to Path conversion beforehand. **Fill and stroke after Union**: the resulting combined path takes on the fill and stroke properties of whichever object was at the bottom of the original stacking order (the object furthest back) — worth checking the result's appearance immediately after running Union, since a combined shape that unexpectedly shows the wrong color usually means the stacking order of the original objects wasn't what you assumed before selecting and merging them. **A common use case**: combining several individually drawn simple shapes (circles, rectangles) into one complex custom icon or logo outline — draw the individual pieces roughly overlapping where they need to connect, select them all, and Union merges them into the single clean path a finished icon or logo mark actually needs, rather than leaving it as several separate overlapping objects. **Union versus simply grouping objects**: grouping (Ctrl+G) keeps the original objects fully separate and independently editable, just bundled to move and select together as one unit — Union instead permanently merges their actual geometry into one new path, with the original individual shapes no longer existing as separate editable objects afterward. Choosing the wrong one of these two is a common early mistake: group when you want to keep future flexibility to edit pieces individually, Union when you specifically want one final, permanently combined shape. **Undo and Union**: like nearly every operation in Inkscape, Union is fully undoable with Ctrl+Z immediately afterward, restoring the original separate objects exactly as they were before the merge — worth knowing since Union genuinely destroys the ability to edit the original shapes individually going forward, so undo is your only path back to the pre-Union state if you change your mind. **Related shortcuts**: Difference (Ctrl+Minus) and Intersection (Ctrl+Asterisk), both covered on the path-operations category page, are the natural companions to Union for building more complex custom shapes — the four Boolean operations together cover combining shapes, cutting one from another, keeping only their overlap, or keeping only their non-overlapping regions, a complete toolkit for constructing intricate outlines from simpler overlapping primitives. **Mistake to avoid**: running Union on shapes that don't actually overlap at all still technically works, but produces a result that's just the two original disconnected shapes now bundled as one path object with no shared boundary — visually this can look identical to before the operation, which sometimes confuses users expecting Union to somehow force disconnected shapes together; Union only removes overlapping interior boundaries, it doesn't reposition or connect shapes that were never touching in the first place.