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Why isn't the name of an instance being displayed

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I sometimes make a master component of a whole page and then create instances with variations to display different states on the same page. But when I do, the name of the instance is not displayed, and this makes it harder to understand what state the page represents.

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djvSolution

Community Support

Hey All, apologies for the delayed reply!

I flagged this to the team, and they confirmed that this is currently expected behavior. The team decided to hide instance names on the canvas because:

Instances are usually in higher volume, so we didn’t want to show too many non-design elements on the canvas
Since instances can also be nested inside other instances, we didn’t want to show that many names but also not differentiate between top level and nested instances
We don’t show names for regular layers, so it made sense that instances be treated similarly to regular layers rather than components

Alamaki

It does help in telling the difference between a frame and a component instance, but there could be some better way for that.

There’s also other wanky name display logic. Master component names are show if they are not in a frame or not on whatever zoom level happens to remove them from sight. Showing them all the time would be more useful. Then you could see what is or is not a master component.

Roman_Luks

New Participant

Why does Figma hide instance names?

Thomas_Bjorksund1

I am daily finding things in the new version of Figma that is hiding or changing how things where. This is one of them. How do I show instance names again?

djvSolution

Community Support

Hey All, apologies for the delayed reply!

I flagged this to the team, and they confirmed that this is currently expected behavior. The team decided to hide instance names on the canvas because:

Instances are usually in higher volume, so we didn’t want to show too many non-design elements on the canvas
Since instances can also be nested inside other instances, we didn’t want to show that many names but also not differentiate between top level and nested instances
We don’t show names for regular layers, so it made sense that instances be treated similarly to regular layers rather than components

Thomas_Bjorksund1

Hi Dvaliao and thanks for the quick reply ✨.

I hear your arguments and understand that angle of the issue.

So the only way for me to show names of objects on the canvas is to put them in a frame and then name that frame?

As a side note I would appreciate to show the name of any kind of group/instance/layer/frame/component/object if its the top level touching the canvas. Makes it easier to see what items are actually a top level item and what is nested in other objects

Screen shot is showing when a name is shown and when its not.

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