At the moment, you can select the frame tool and click in a frame and it’ll add a frame, but when frames are nested and not easily selectable with the frame tool, it would be advantageous to be able to quick insert a frame into a selected frame on your artboard or in the layers panel
One way of resolving this could be to add it to the right click menu or into Object on the main menu, similar to “Frame selection” option
I’ve never run into a case where this was an issue myself, but in any case this would be a bit more tricky than just giving you the option.
The answers I imagine would differ on the size of the parent frame and the space the siblings occupy. Which would not be consistent.
I think you’d need to argue the why and how to solve those issues before this suggestion be taken into consideration.
I guess it depends on your approach, but my idea is similar to what adobe has been doing with their layers menu. In Photoshop you can select a group and add a layer to it and you can select a layer and quickly add another layer above it right in the layer’s panel. This idea is more about extending the functionality, it would function the same way as the frame tool functions when adding a frame, but allow for more accuracy which is helpful if you’re not building an item from scratch, taking over a project or just adding in more details. At the moment, if you’re wanting to be accurate, as far as I’m aware, you have to create that item first, cut it, go into your nested layer and paste it - if you can give me a different work flow, I’d appreciate it.
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Picking up on this: Add a shortcut to quick insert a frame into a selected frame
Once you start thinking in terms of Autolayout, it’s often easier to build your complex objects from the “outside in”, for example, you think of the outside frame and know you need to split it into two horizontal columns, so you create an empty frame and immediately apply Autolayout. Then you proceed to add two empty frames to that for your two columns, and continue that way.
Unfortunately, as the hierarchy gets complex, adding new frames inside existing ones becomes a challenge because we only have 2 ways to create a frame right now:
Option 1 defeats the purpose of this post because it’s working from the inside out
Option 2 rarely works the way you want because it’s up to Figma to decide where in the hierarchy that frame you drew is going to appear. Sometimes it gets it right - most of the time it’s inside the wrong element of the hierarchy and then dragging it into the correct element can become a challenge.
I’m proposing, as @Stephen3 suggested, that you simply select the layer you want the frame inside and choose Insert Frame.
The frame will be created and inserted into that element, and positioned according to the rules of the parent element.
If it’s just a frame or a group, then it gets inserted top right and has an arbitrary width and height (we could say 100px x 100px)
If it’s an Autolayout frame, then it gets inserted according to autolayout rules and I’d suggest the default be Fill / Fill to start with.
There is a workaround that sometimes can work, which is to create the frame somewhere else, cut it, select the layer you want it inside and paste it in there.
Since Figma can already do this, my proposal should be trivial to implement, since all it’s doing is saving a few steps.
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