It’s pretty normal in a good, complex UI built using best practices.

This is so needed, and frankly, so simple . You already have vertical scrolling, just add a horizontal scrollbar and call it a day. I have many well-built UIs that have 15+ levels of depth.

The layers panel is an area that needs much love. Beyond scrolling you also need better disclosure management (find a usable way to mange what disclosures are opened and closed), but that’s another topic for another time.

I disagree that such deep nesting is a “best practice”. The structure becomes too rigid and hard to work with.

“The structure becomes too rigid and hard to work with.”

You’re perfectly right, describing a defect in the Figma UX. The best practice is dictated by the tools and hierarchies that Figma has in place. For example, leveraging Autolayout frames, or having nested component hierarchies for consistent UI implementation across a vast application. If your entire UI is more-or-less “flat” then you’re Doing It Wrong, unless your designs are extremely simplistic.

If you’re creating a little mobile app, then sure, You can probably get away with a handful of Layers and all is well in the world.

I’m designing complex scientific enterprise software, that itself has multiple panels or windows, and spans dozens of pages and hundreds of frames. There’s no escaping the complexity and creating a flat layout would be a huge error in terms of consistency, reusability, editability and prototyping.

The issue is that Figma allows - almost - requires this level of complexity, but the Layers panel doesn’t really reflect that reality. It’s the Layers UI that makes the structure “too rigid and hard to work with”.

But then again, having browsed through many community designs and layouts, it’s fair to say that most Figma users aren’t really using the tool to its fullest potential and folks are not properly taking advantage of flexible layouts, smart components etc. So I’m not surprised that the Layers panel works for many users as-is.

Nonetheless, a horizontal scrollbar is a trivial addition to the UI and would, if not completely solve the problem, at least alleviate some of the pain of having to constantly be resizing the lefthand Layers pane just to access nested layers that are completely out of sight!

Anyway to make a plugin for this? I’d pay $20 for this feature.

No, plugins can’t do this.

This seriously needs to be IMPLEMENTED! PLEASE!

Much needed function

This is so simple and is really needed when I work on my 14" MBP! How has this not been implemented yet?

almost 5 years later, nothing changed… 🥶

Sometimes, though, we might inherit a file that’s deeply nested – so horizontal scrolling would help us understand and reorder that file, if so desired.

This! Thank you

And even resizing the panel is often not enough since it has a max width.

They added a tooltip to at least be able to read the layer name, but that’s a poor fix compared to the simplicity of adding an horizontal scroll.

Dear Figma, this has been an issue since 2021 (or longer!)!.

Please fix this!

My workaround was to spend $1,000 on an ultra-wide gaming monitor. Now there’s TONS of room for that layers panel.

😦

I doubt their cross-platform webview framework allows it, but having detachable panels (like Adobe has) that can be dragged to other monitors would also address the issue for some users…

Hi Figma team

im just suggesting can we try to give horizontal option in layers section of the bottom when we have lot of laers and group layer is hidden insted of we increase left sidbar window size from drag its wrong i think

thanks

Hey all, we’re starting to roll this out over the next week in UI3 starting today. Just wanted to update you all. Some of the interactions (ex: auto scroll on selection changes while traversing the layers panel, truncation of names, etc) took a bit longer than expected to refine. Appreciate your patience.

Hey All, thank you for your patience!

As @Tom_Lowry already mentioned, it’s rolling out THIS WEEK! 🎉

Unbelievable! Finally! Thanks ❤️

Yaas!

So happy! Glad it finally made it’s way to a release.

Finally after 3 years, it has been completely fixed

🎉 Great news, everyone!

Horizontal scrolling in the layers panel is now fully rolled out at 100%! 🙌

Thank you so much for your patience and support while our team worked hard to bring this feature to life! 🚀

Yaaaay!!! So happy.

will it be available in old UI?

I have horizontal scroll in design mode, but not in dev mode. Could you clarify why this is the case? I primarily use dev mode as a developer.