Dev mode Measure tool without full Design seat

I’m adding to this as well. I’m a developer and our company recently switched from another UI design application to Figma, I was using the previous application’s ruler equivalent all the time, so now it’s a bit frustrating that I can’t accurately measure things easily.

 

• Would you want those measurements to show for everyone, or just yourself?
  - Just myself
• Would you want those measurements to persist 
  - I don’t mind really; I don’t need them to persist, but if they do just make it easy to delete them.

Thank you!

As a developer, I’ve also found the measurement tool in Dev Mode extremely useful and feel really frustrated that we can’t have it anymore. 😥

What Figma needs to see here are the following points IMO:

• developers don’t always structure elements the same way as designers do - even when cooperation is really fluid between them. Some things only literally come up during development phase. And a grouping that makes sense from the designer point of view, sometimes needs to be different in code, ie. because our existing components are structured such a way.
• sometimes we need relative measurements - we don’t have the eyes of designers, I need to see if a group of elements is the same width as another (or another group of) element(s). This doesn’t mean that the tool should have extra functionality; I’m just emphasizing the importance of easy manual measurements.
• I get there might be tricks and shortcuts etc. to still measure, but we are developers and we use Figma differently (compared to designers), plus we don’t have the same “dexterity” and muscle memory for that like designers do - however, the measurement tool was absolutely easy and straightforward to use, so this was simply not a problem. 

As for the above questions about what behavior we’d expect of the tool: 

• it is OK (even desirable) if measurement lines are only visible for me (or it should be super easy to delete them)
• they shouldn’t persist IMO, I’d typically only measure what I need once or twice (it was so straightforward that re-doing it is simply not a problem) 

I hope Figma reconsiders this decision and we can get back the plain old measurement tool that we had until April 2024. 

I just wanted to weigh in here as well. I am also a developer that could really use the measure tool. Here is an example I just ran into and brought me to this thread.

In this case I have two text elements beside each other horizontally. “Locations & ATMs” is the first element and “Over 40,000 fee-free ATMs.” is the second. I want to know the gap between the two elements, but it looks like there is maybe an extra space in the “Locations & ATMs “ element. That means that the gap is not 23px but is probably more around 40px.

In this case, I could go file a ticket to request that the designer remove a single space from their text box and properly space the two elements, but it sure would be a whole lot easier to just measure myself.

We really need the measurement function in the developer mode, too. It is very important for our project. Without it, Figma does not seem to be the right tool … since we have to talk to the designers for so much small measures or have to calculate that stuff ourself. We would save so much time with this simple tool.

Any updates on this? I really don’t know why the Figma team would remove it. lol

Hi Figma Team,

I wanted to share some feedback regarding a feature that was previously available in Dev Mode: the ability to draw custom measurement lines between objects. This tool was incredibly useful for our workflow, as it allowed us to measure distances freely and annotate designs directly within Dev Mode.

Since its removal, our workflow has become less efficient because we no longer have this flexible measurement capability. Restoring this feature, or offering a similar functionality, would be highly valuable for developers who rely on precise visual measurements while inspecting designs.

Thank you for considering this request! Figma has always been a key part of our design-to-dev process, and improvements like this would make Dev Mode even more powerful.

Best regards,
Shahboz 

Can we get a sense of whether or not this is going to be prioritized? Losing the ability to measure distances means I have to use a third-party tool to bring measuring back to Figma. Using third-party tools introduces the potential for inaccuracy during handoff between design and engineering.