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dimdan
January 5, 2024

Local Variables visible to View Only users

  • January 5, 2024
  • 9 replies
  • 1208 views

Engineers on my team just noticed that they can’t see and export local variables unless they have edit permissions. This is a huge limitation since not everyone on my team can have edit permissions due to licensing/cost.

My ideas is to keep local variables visible to View Only collaborators. They should not be able to edit the variables.

9 replies

Gayani_S
Figmate
Community Support
January 8, 2024

Hey Daniela, thank you for your feedback! We’ll pass this along to the teams.

February 5, 2024

I totally agree! This is just a MUST. I am on an enterprise plan, and have around 50 dev viewers in my department alone. They are thousands in the org.

February 5, 2024

Another thing we need is for properties column to show the content of the variable, like e.g. HEX value for color var. Not just its name. Same reason as above request.

Kendra_Davis
August 6, 2024

+1 to this! we need it desperately.

August 8, 2024

This is a must have!

Steven_O_Neil
August 23, 2024

I too can vouch for this issue. It is tedious and time consuming to expect developers to manually add variables one by one to their codebase as they can only see the relevant upon selecting an element

Sarah_Graham1
New Member
January 21, 2025

As a work-around I have had to build a table listing out all the token names and their primitive tokens and all the hex values for everyone to see, but it must be updated manually - which is easy to forget -- so confusion arrises. Very annoying pain point!

TamLe54
New Member
March 13, 2026

Can not agree more! It is must have. Especially making features like themes or light/dark mode. Manually checking color variables take dev and designer a lots of time

Jennifer G
New Member
April 14, 2026

Two years this group has been asking for this and no changes? I now have to upgrade my team of 5 engineers to edit access. This seems like a huge money grab on the part of Figma.