Figma can generate UI from a prompt, ship a website, and animate half a marketing site before lunch. It still cannot lock a ruler guide.
That is not a niche request. That is table stakes. Illustrator had it. InDesign had it. Photoshop had it. Sketch had it. Fireworks had it. FreeHand had it. CorelDRAW had it. The version of PageMaker your professor used in a computer lab with beige CRTs had it. Figma looked at a hundred years of computer-aided layout, nodded, and shipped guides that behave like wet spaghetti you accidentally selected.
You cannot lock them. You will grab one when you meant to drag a layer. You will not notice until the whole composition is 3px off and you are gaslighting yourself about whether the grid was always like that. Layout grids are not a substitute. They are a column system. The second the layout is irregular, overlapping, or not “12 columns and a prayer,” you need actual guides. Figma’s answer is: use the tool that cannot do the job, or use the tool that keeps moving when you sneeze near it.
You also cannot change the color. The guides are one fixed magenta-adjacent pink. Put them on a reddish or purple background and they vanish. In every other tool this is a preference. In Figma it is a personality test: how long will you squint before you give up and draw rectangles named guide_do_not_touch.
There is no Delete All. Official workflow: click a guide, delete, click a guide, delete, click a guide, delete, consider a career in print. Shift+R hides them. Hiding is not deleting. I do not want them lurking. I want them gone. Plugins exist because the product does not.
While we are here: why are UX designers required to do their jobs in the UX design tool with the worst UX any of us have used in actual design software? We get paid to notice when a control is discoverable, when an object stays where you put it, and when a basic task does not take a plugin and a forum thread from 2021. Then we open Figma and spend twenty minutes fighting a guide we cannot lock, cannot recolor, cannot multi-select, and cannot clear. That is not a power-user edge case. That is the product failing the exact discipline it sells to. If this shipped in a file we were reviewing, it would come back with a severity-2 note and a screenshot. Instead we get another AI entry point and a “we value your feedback” stamp on a request older than some of the people implementing the AI.
This is not “we haven’t gotten to it.” The lock-guides thread is older than some of the interns. People have been filing the same request since at least 2021. The official reply is always some variant of “we value your feedback and would like to gauge community reaction,” which is Figma for “we heard you, we logged it next to the other obvious things, and then we shipped another AI button.”
Guides are not a vibe. They are infrastructure. You do not need a research sprint to know that alignment tools should stay where you put them. Please stop treating 1990 as an aspirational roadmap item.