LAUNCHED: Horizontal scroll the layers panel

It’s hard to scroll through child components in an autolayout. Sometimes expanding the panel helps but sometimes it exceeds beyond that

1. Keep accidentally clicking on the scroll bar when trying to expand the layers panel and losing my place, super frustrating. (off topic, but same issue for hide/show icon which is next to scroll bar)
2. The max width is not working for deep layers
3. Horizontal scroll feels the most natural and temporary here so I don’t have to stretch and unstretch the panel. I’m in and out of a layer quick

Figma please fix this issue. Navigating layers with Auto-Layout has become so tedious, constantly expanding the side-bar is annoying and defeats the purpose of trying to give us more screen real estate with the option minimising each side panel.

Take a leaf out of Webflow’s book when it comes to the layer navigation panel, it’s much more condensed.

100% agreement, even on a LARGE monitor I start feeling the pinch when dealing with very deep and complex mockups. This seems like a no-brainer, plenty of other tools allow this sort of simple horizontal scroll to deal with deep nested layers - please Figma, take care of this.

I would much, MUCH rather have this fixed than any number of AI features.

+1 - Much needed feature!

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.