Fr/Percent units for more control over auto layout content

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
January 29, 2021
214 replies
20235 views

Although I find the new autolayout UI extremely convoluted and overdesigned, the ‘hug/fill parent’ feature is great. However, It would be immensely helpful to have more control over how the elements fill the parent.

Currently, the only option is for the elements to fill the remaining space, but oftentimes, I need certain elements to take up a certain proportion.

Example: I need element-1 to take up 2fr (~66%) and the rest to take up 1fr (~33%). It would be a game-changer if we could use ‘fr’ units.

Framer does this beautifully and it’s vital for efficient, adaptive layout workflows:

Mihael

New Participant

I vote for fr units, it would be nice to have around, if Figma can handle percentages, I can’t see the reason why fr can’t be supported. It is a bit of a paradigm shift, but that’s fine 🙂

Aalok_TrivediAuthor

For sure. FR units are amazing. Plus Figma doesn’t even handle percentage (unless I’m missing something). OMG after using Framer’s layout tools, it’s really hard to come back.

Mihael

New Participant

You can enter percentages in Frame options (width/height/X/Y).

Aalok_TrivediAuthor

But that’s in relation to itself/current value, not to the parent frame.

Mihael

New Participant

true 😉

Ben_Smeets

Active Member

Just a quick addition, that i totally get what was mentioned about the great but convoluted methods for working with Auto-layout-like functionality in Figma. it’s great that it’s there don’t get me wrong. But after working with Framer for 5 minutes (where people that are used to “web” find their way intuitively I think), it’s painful to go back to Figma and having to trial/error 20 times on each layout action to get things to line up (and stay lined up).

I think the whole Layout thing is where Sketch stumbled a bit as well, Figma seems to have a challenge with it sometimes also (although less so). For an outsider it’s hard to understand as in… just do what Framer did 🙂

Aalok_TrivediAuthor

@Ben_Smeets Agreed!. Framer has the best design/layout/prototyping/preview tools and functionality by a wide margin. As soon as they introduce type styles (really frustrating and a shame they haven’t yet…), I’m switching over to Framer. They’ll soon be implementing auto-sizing as well.

Maris_Naylor

+1 for this

Lisa_Weishaupl

New Participant

When using auto layout, I can chose different ways to define the width/height of the elements: “fixed”, “hug” content and “fill container”. In many cases none of these matches how the design should be implemented. I want elements to have a relative width of e.g. 2 of 12 columns or 30 %. By offering to add a relative value or working with columns I could move one step closer to the actual implemented result of a responsive design