Disable auto-nesting/auto-reparenting while moving objects

When dragging objects, I only want them to nest into a frame when the frame is used as a “screen” or the main frame of the composition.

I almost never want to drag an object unconsciously to end up in a frame, unless it is to enter the main frame of the composition.

Currently, the way to avoid this behaviour is to drag and press “spacebar”, which is counterintuitive and slowing down my process. Also, it doesn’t “force” an object to enter a frame, which is the most common behaviour I’d want, to force an object.

For this, I would personally would like to be able to invert this shortcut in order to use it when wanting to consciously nest an object in a frame, but never have the surprise to drag an object to see it randomly nested.

Does anyone else experience this?

I often use redlining, sticky notes, etc to markup design files in Figma. These objects are conceptually separate from the actual UI in the frames I’m building but sometimes make sense to overlay on top of my designs. I know there is functionality to hold the spacebar and have the object ignore the drag/drop into frames functionality. However, this is a bit cumbersome and has to be done every time I want to move something around. I also know that locking a frame would stop this from happening, but I often want to edit the frame at the same time that I am doing markup.

I would like an option, maybe a checkbox, to say “make this object ignore frames”. With this option enabled, I can move the object however I see fit without worrying that it may drop into a frame accidentally. All copied versions of this object would respect this rule, until disabled.

Are there any other approaches that I am not considering? Does anyone else experience this? Does anyone else agree that an option to tell an object to always ignore frames would be useful?

1000% this. 👆

While in theory auto-nesting sounds awesome, in practice it’s actually quite troublesome and an unexpected behavior. No other visual editing or design tool works like this (including Photoshop, upon which Figma bases it’s layer-ordering mechanics), so auto-nesting actually actually more of an anti-pattern since it bucks convention without good reason.

Auto-nesting is an added behavior, so it should be treated as such. Holding down spacebar (or some other key) to enable auto-nesting makes total sense in this context. Last I saw this this issue came around 2019 and has yet to be addressed. Would love to see a fix for it soon.

When I wrote the now years-old Spectrum post linked above, the spacebar feature had not been implemented. I’ve gotten used to the spacebar workaround but agree that it should’ve been the other way around. And auto-reparenting can be useful in many cases, especially when placing objects within auto layout stacks.

Now that I and plenty of other Figmates are used to it, though, it would be an adjustment if Figma switched up the default behavior. So I would like this to be a setting… Like “Reverse spacebar auto-reparenting” which would flip the spacebar to be the keyboard shortcut to enable auto-reparenting while dragging.

Totally agree with the comments expressed here.

From a UX perspective if I create an object that lives in the top layer and need to move it into position, shouldn’t I expect it to always be on the top layer by default wherever I move it!

It’s as if Figma is making creative choices without my permission by deciding to randomly group my top layered object with an object below. And it’s even more strange because the user action I am performing is moving an object on the x y plane. This x y plane movement action has nothing to do with changing layer depth or being moved to a group.

As suggested already, nesting should be an opt-in action.

Most often I am moving objects to position them, not to nest them.

Just joining in to get more voices behind ‘inverting’ this feature. It sounds powerful/useful on paper, but is awkward in reality, really slowing down the design process.

I can’t spend 90% of my day holding the spacebar.

Yes, Did they fix this? I think when I select a Frame, there will be an option to turn on/off auto-nesting of only this frame. Sometimes when a frame is “closing” I don’t want any more children in it.

They can add an option in Settings where you can choose if you want this “feature”.

I see there are a lot of requests for this feature but doesn’t seem like its addressed still?

I am glad I read this post. Good to know I can hold the space bar to prevent nesting. But i also agree this should not be primary behavior. It can be so frustrating sometimes.