LAUNCHED: Resizable columns in the authoring modal

Hi Stephen! Thank you for sharing your feedback! I can’t guarantee anything on our end, but I can give some visibility to our team for consideration. 🙂

In the meantime, do not also forget to vote up your idea ⬆️

I don’t know why this doesn’t have more votes. You guys explicitly recommend variable names with full words and no abbreviations, which makes for some long variable names. But the default column width is very narrow making it incredibly hard to search through long lists of variables?

This is a pretty annoying issue that I hope gets resolved. I feel like it would actually be a quick fix too… Pretty please with a cherry on top, can we allow for the columns in variable be resizable.

To be more thorough - the entire variables experience is pretty rough. I know it says “beta” but I feel like there hasn’t been much change since it was introduced, and it’s a fundamental part of Figma now.

It’s hard to see at a glance of what’s going on. Selecting tokens (let’s say) forces us into this tiny little window to do this important work.

Here’s to hoping!

Maybe it helps if we add a design proposal?

You are pushing design system in all talks during CONFIG24. You want us to leverage design tokens but you don’t want us to see the full token name? 🤨

Come on! Add resizing inside variables table.

Please allow to resize the column to fit longer strings or wrap the strings inside cell for easier editing… We are using these variables to manage content in the UI, so it should be easy to edit like in Google Sheet, for UX writers to feel more comfortable with this…

I can’t believe this is still not in the feature. I simply cannot work with variables in this view due to the variable name lengths. Seems like such a basic facility to have, come on Figma team, let’s try actually living the rhetoric of “for the designers” yeah?

I tried a little hack job to improve this in case anyone is as tired of waiting as I am 😬

NOTE - You have to do this every time you reload Figma, the file OR the variables modal. It’s not convenient at all. Useful though if you’re spending days grinding through design tokens in a library file that you keep open

1. Open the Variables modal
2. Open Console (Plugins, Development, Show/Hide Console
3. Using Element inspect (CMS + Shift + C), find the <table> element in the code
4. In the Console Styles tab, you want to edit the value of grid-template-columns.

The default is 200px repeat(1, 200px) minmax(40px, 1fr). If you change the first 200px, this will change the width of the Name column. If you change the 2nd 200px this will change the mode value columns.

As I say, this resets every time you close the Variables modal. But if you’re going through your variables and setting scoping for example, it’s easier than dealing with the equally average truncation Figma uses 🙄

Oh yeah. Wait til you get hundreds of variables and find there is no way to search within variables. Or that there is no way to collapse all or expand all in the sidebar.

Fun with unfinished products!

Figma has adopted Ron Popiel’s motto. “Set it and forget it!”

Once it is out the door, good luck with it.

Yeah it really seems that way. Used to be an amazing product, but the quality is just dropping and dropping. The focus seems to be more in profit. I guess that brush with Adobe taught them a few things