Hi Friends,
I'm pretty sure this can't be done. But I might learn a new trick by asking anyway. Is there any way to remove an object from a group, without ungrouping?

I'm working on a very complex image, with many groups and nested groups. Occassionally I need to duplicate a path that is buried in a bunch of nested groups. It's easy enough to select it and duplicate it, but it becomes part of the group. The only way I know to get the path out of the group, is to ungroup, then Shift + click to deselect it, then re-group the original objects. Then I can select it, and move it to wherever I need it (in this case, to a different layer). The problem is that the object is actually on the bottom of groups of groups, which were tricky to get all grouped in the first place. By the time I get things ungrouped, it's really hard to regroup everything. So it would be delightful if I could select it, and.....I don't know, click "remove from group" button, or keystrokes that would get it out of the group?

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Ah-HA!! A short time later, and I've found 2 solutions on my own. But since I haven't seen this question asked here before, I'll go ahead and post it. And who knows, there may be better solutions than what I've found, that other clever Inkscapers can offer

In this case, I need to move the duplicate to another layer. For some reason, I thought one object of a group could not be moved to another layer. But I couldn't remember what happens. So I had to try it. Low and behold, I indeed am able to select an object in a group, and move to a different layer. Apparently, it automatically ungroups them. ....Well, it doesn't ungroup the whole group, it just takes the object that was moved to another layer, out of the group. The original group is still intact. That trick will come in handy for me, in other situations, I'm sure

The other solution is to use Copy instead of Duplicate. When I paste the copied object, it's not part of the group like its original.

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Please feel free to post any comments

I find myself doing this a lot, except that I'm usually trying to remove an object from within a group, rather than duplicate it outside the group. I use your second solution: CTRL-X to remove it (CTRL-C for a copy in your case), navigate to the layer/group it needs to go into, then CTRL-ALT-V to paste in place (or CTRL-V if I want it pasted at the mouse position).