I have been playing around with creating variables but realized I would rather have groups in separate collections, but cannot move them.
I would like to be able to duplicate an entire collection so I don’t have to manually re-create values and can remove what I don’t need from that collection OR simply be able to move groups into other collections.
I appreciate the transparency, but with all due respect, I don’t think the dev team understand how much this is limiting variables in the actual application. I can not stress enough how much time is wasted trying to organise variables. There must surely be a way to implement the ability to select variables and move them into another collection. Please, please feed this back to the team - this should be much higher priority than it sounds like it’s been given.
Yes please, would love this!
Please, stop developing anything else and make this function! Move Variables across collection! This need is here from tha beginning of Variables! Now it is not beta! Make it. This is so needed!!!
+1 Yes please! We need this.
This is 100% needed, otherwise there is a lot of manual work, especially with lots of variables. This would make things more efficient.
Pitching in to show my support.
The state of the variables modal management is just the worst and with very few steps would be enhanced greatly, for example:
And i am sure there are many more amazing ideas people raised in this thread
I highly agree with this. I desperately needed to avoid so much extra and unnecessary work. It should be a relatively simple feature to implement, too, and would be very valuable!
Hey Figma,
Is there any update on this or anything from the Variable’s team. It’s been several months, with new posts appearing every day or so requesting this. I’m personally at the point where I need to start looking for another solution and abandon variables all together because they’re simply too complex to manage with the no variable management tools provided. Please provide an update.
+1 please! Really needed
For anyone watching this, check out today’s release notes. Copying/pasting variables is now available. Still a little buggy (it isn’t remembering the initial layout, and I can’t just copy and past the group yet.) But this a very needed feature and I am happy it’s getting some attention.
Was extatic to see this in the release, but tested it first thing this morning, and it doesn’t respect any folder structure at all and puts every variable in one group. So in a tested instance, I copied the following:
Copied
text/default/default 1
text/default/default 2
text/inverse/default 1
icon/default/default 1
icon/default/default 2
Pasted
default 5
default 4
default 1
default 3
default 2
Order, names, folders all gone awry. Not even something we can use as a base to work from in all honesty, especially when you’re working with hundreds of variables across multiple brands.
There’s also a bug where it’s creating new empty collections when pasting between file. Even if it’s the collection is named the same.
Hey @Sean_Leahy and @Tara_Price2, thanks for flagging!
We’ll pass this feedback onto our Variables team to investigate. Are either of you able to share an example file or screen recording?
If you’re not able to share your file publicly, please submit a bug report to our technical quality team directly via the form here: https://help.figma.com/hc/en-us/requests/new
Very welcome alpha version of a feature!
• This does not work across different files.
• It needs a color present to be able to paste.
• As other mentioned: groups.
• Oddly, the pasted list of colors does not allow me to rearrange / manually sort the items.
Bug reported @dvaliao, thanks. Hadn’t noticed you can’t reorder pasted variables too, so included that in the report @MediaChoice
I am glad to see some work on this, and it (bugs aside) should satisfy the copy aspect of the request.
However, I want to note that being able to copy a variable from one spot and paste a duplicate of that variable into another collection is not the same thing as being able to move a variable from one collection to another, as references to the original variable do not follow the variable from its origin to its destination, and instead get lost when the original variable is deleted.
Those who wish to move variables from one collection to another still have a ton of work, as after copy/pasting they would need to track down and manually update all references to each variable. What would satisfy the second part of this request is a move function that automatically updates references when variables are moved between collections, just like occurs when variables are renamed or moved between groups within a collection.
+1 on what @Matthew_Ryan is saying.
+1 on Moving variables.
Just heard back on the bug report, and the copy+paste and reorder bugs look to have been fixed. When pasting, you have to have no other variables selected, otherwise they’ll be pasted into that group flat.
+1 On moving variables. Copying doesn’t cover this.
Any word back on the lack of support for moving variables? Is that something the team plans to address? In the meantime, can we remove “Launched” from the name of this idea, since the need described has only partially been addressed?
There wasn’t but I reiterated the point in my reply post-fix.
@dvaliao I am wondering if we could remove the “LAUNCHED” tag from the title of this. I don’t think it’s accurate to say it has launched when half of the idea in this post (moving variables) is yet to be implemented.
Or would you prefer we create a new post for it?
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