I'm creating some abstractions dynamically with the [obj ( message to a subpatch, which are actually oscillator instances. If I want to reduce the number of instances, I want to delete the excess ones.

I know I can do this by sending [clear( to the subpatch and create the new ones, or maybe with iemgut's [canvasdelete], but I don't want to clear all the instances and create them anew (I just want to keep the ones I need), neither use [canvasdelete], as I'm trying to make this as much vanilla as possible.

What I'm doing now, is keep track of the number of instances, calculate their canvas coordinates, and use them with these messages [editmode 1, mouse 20 $1 0 0, mouseup 60 $2 0(, and then [cut, editmode 0(. So the excess abstractions are being selected and then I'm cutting them. Is there a way to tell Pd to delete them? Like hitting backspace...
I tried with [makefilename %c] but didn't seem to work.