Disable auto-nesting/auto-reparenting while moving objects

My wrist is hurting from constantly holding spacebar. This “feature” is a dark pattern and should instead be opt-in. It’s unreasonable to force everyone to use the workaround with spacebar.

Is there a setting for this yet? it’s driving me insane

I totally agree, this should be an opt-in feature.
A key combination can be used to allow for auto nesting instead of disabling it.

Just like everyone else here, I find auto-nesting an unintuitive waste of time, energy, concentration and nerves. I can’t understand why anyone would come up with such an idea and get support for it.

Figma: Do a usability test on 5 participants and see if they ‘get it’.

Not sure if reverting it solves the issue but nonetheless I agree with auto-nesting being quite annoying and troublesome.

This feature should be opt-in with a key press.

It’s super frustrating that you can’t create a new text layer, in a specific folder, by click-dragging. It tries to nest the layer in a frame.

It should only auto-layer-sort when holding CMD on mac or CTRL on Windows, for instance.

I’m finally annoyed enough with the interaction to actually write something down about this. And YES!!! Please reverse this interaction to have it enabled when I’m holding down the spacebar. Or at the very least, give us the option to turn it off in the preferences.

I would love this. The logical pattern to me (and other POVs I’ve read here) is that it should be reversed (i.e. hold space to auto-nest) but I understand that it would then be in opposition to a known method. So let’s get that preference to switch it!

This was something that really hurt me when first learning Figma.

To mitigate the space bar and dragging I think is easier to just cut the element (command + X) and select where you wanna place it and hit (command + Shift + V) this prevents the standard behavior of pasting, so if I were to select an auto layout and hit cmnd + shift + v, Figma will paste this element as a sibling, next to that auto layout, and not inside. I use this command 95% of the time.

Thanks for sharing, @Mojo . I think many of us use the same approach as you’ve described as an alternative to holding the space bar, but unfortunately, the pain is still there.

When you paste an item like that, it ends on top of the selected object, usually in the top left corner. Afterwards, it’s still needed to move/nudge the object to its desired location from where it was cut and later move it to its preferred group. When you multiply this process with the number of times you want to move an object, the time spent on such simple action during the day is ridiculous.

Another alternative is to right-click and choose “Paste here”, but that’s also not a great command for the intended action.

If you think the Figma team should look into this auto-nesting feature, please vote at the top of this page to help get it noticed.