Better plugin window management (fixed sidebar, multiple windows, stacking etc.)

Thank you very much Gleb!

I just switching from sketch to figma and the window management and integration of the plugins within the sidebar is much better done at sketch.

yeah, exactly. I was working long time in sketch & figma loses greatly in this.
If they would catch up with that it would greatly increase figma user exeprience, probably more people would move to figma.
There is big plugin community in figma but it lack proper user experience.

Run commands is great, but sometime I just forgot name of the plugin & then I need to find it in a list and I lose time.
If you could add managing of plugins UI, I would always have plugins that I’m interest in open & didn’t need to lose time for searching for them. But also this is problem of plugins in figma, that you can only have 1 open.

Agreed, I think plugins need to work like they do in most applications I’ve used plugins/extensions in. Whether that’s MS Word, Visual Studio Code, Photoshop, Even slack to an extent, they should just be a bit more integrated into the workflow.

Half the problem for me is that a lot of plugins have functionality I feel Figma should ideally support out of the box. (E.g. some of the component management stuff like Instance Utils). And I think there are other issues associated with that…

But putting aside my thoughts on plug-ins carrying the weight where I’d love to see a native solution 😛. It’d be great if plugin developers at least had the capability to fit them into the UI. I wonder if it could be made a bit more modular like Photoshop, where you can move panels around, expand/collapse them etc. Would be a big change and I imagine it would need a lot of validation. But that way if there’s certain plugins I use a lot I can give them a permanent place in my UI without having to think of it as going into “plugin mode”

Loving figma so far! The addition of this functionality would make it way more intuitive to use plugins! 🙏

Moving over from Sketch to Figma over the last year I am frustrated by the clunky Figma UI. Sketch does plugin and symbol (component) management so much better. Being able to drag your symbol panel onto another screen, and have multiple plugin windows open and on another screen is so much better useability. Constantly having to open and close plugins in Figma is a time waster. Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of things Figma does better than Sketch which makes me reluctant to go back full time to Sketch but an overhaul in this respect is overdue!

Sometimes I have to work with multiple plugins at the same time. Currently, I can only keep one plugin open at a time. Would be good if I can see multiple windows open or simply toggled when clicked.
Also plugin windows sometimes occupies a big chunk of screen while they can’t be minimized.

When I press Shift+I to insert a component/widget/plugin I want to be able to navigate between these three tabs with my keyboard. Is there a way to do this?

There is currently no such way. So feel free to leave your feedback and vote in this thread: Shortcut (Alt + 4) to open new plugins panel.

These features would be great. It would be much more convenient to use the plugins.