Add “Unmask” option to menu instead of “Use as Mask”

Other people have issues with it as well:

Solution, which is not intuitive (unless you are using a shortcut):

My two cents: Having a separate menu item for that is a little bit complicated, because unlike Group/Ungroup, Mask/Unmask have the same shortcut (it’s a toggle). So I think changing the menu title would be ok, however again this won’t be an ideal solution because if you are changing the shortcut for this command, you will have to somehow account for this change, and it’s not always possible with external software. But if there was a native way to change shortcuts in Figma, that would be an ideal.

Thanks for the feedback and additional thoughts. I guess my feeling is that the current mask behaviour isn’t intuitive or consistent with how group/ungroup works (separate commands), though I appreciate that grouping functionality is slightly different.

Interesting to hear about issues with Mask improvement suggestions (#1 separate mask commands, would need additional keyboard shortcut, and #2 Keeping as toggle but dynamically update label text, would break the way keyboard shortcut mapping is currently done).

Perhaps a third option could be to keep it as a single, toggle option but rename the text to “Use as mask / Release mask”? Not very elegant, admittedly.

Oh yea, that sounds like a good idea in my opinion! Maybe even something something like “Toggle mask” to make it shorter (but I would say it’s a bit confusing).

Something I find unusual about Figma, a tool for helping build experiences, is that its tools sometimes ignore well established conventions and patterns used in the industry. Why? Bit of irony there. Is it a desire to be distinct, unique? Creating a mask is troublesome enough but releasing that mask is always confusing and tedious. Typically, I have to delete the elements in question and re-create them in order to get to my desired visual result. Despite what is stated above, simply clicking “Use as mask” again to release a mask doesn’t, strangely, just release the mask as would be expected.

I’ve learned to love its other idiosyncrasies, but the masking feature is the one that constantly slows me down. I don’t necessarily want it to work like Adobe. I just want it to work well, period (whatever way that might be).