Remove automatic absolute positioning in autolayout

I’ve noticed this too, it’s very frustrating.

Hey there, thank you for your feedback! I’ve changed the category from “General Discussion” to “Share an Idea”. I am going to share this feedback internally with the teams for consideration.
Also, feel free to upvote this post. This helps us roadmap future updates.

Thank you!

I have the same issue, very confusing

I was such a huge fan of absolute positioning in Figma when it was first introduced, and still am. But the fact that it automatically happens in some cases for auto layout is certainly frustrating because I don’t always notice it and end up confused on why my components are acting weird. It would be great to have the option to turn off the auto-absolute positioning feature. I hope to see this change in the very near future.

Absolute positioning should never happen automatically. It’s always an exception, particularly when developers are expected to look at the design in terms of intention and structure. And it can cause so many unexpected issues in design and code when it comes to responsive behaviour, reflow and the cascade. Now with every new AL frame I need to toggle absolute positioning on all children on and off, to ensure I don’t miss any. I love most of what Figma does; some decisions are slightly annoying, but this one drives me up the wall daily. Although I do see real value in having it, I would prefer no absolute positioning at all, than have it being applied automatically; particularly in the context of a layout feature that is specifically supposed to follow a set of (flex) rules.

This behavior is so frustrating. It should be a bug fix rather than a feature request. Automatically turning on absolute positioning for SOME objects in an autolayout frame is just bizarre and frustrating.

This feature should stay in Suggest auto layout, but removed from the regular one

This happens to me all the time, I even looked it up and figured out what the heck it was a few months ago so I finally understand why it happens. but then I forgot the name and I have been googling for several days now to find it again and I STILL haven’t found the way to REMOVE it without having to watch a video. Why on earth is there not a context menu option to remove absolute positioning when it is not something that I asked for? It should be easy to get rid of. Instead I’m randomly copying other elements to try to get one that doesn’t have it. I know there’s a way to do it but seriously I should not have to go on a help document deep dive to find this.

Hello please fix absolute position. I’m getting frustrated when I hide something in a component, and after unhiding that element, it goes to the absolute position for that fix issue, which I’ve copied again and again. I find it very frustrating. Fix that ASAP.

This is so frustrating. Please fix it

I was about to create a new post because of this frustrating “feature” I haven’t seen it save time even once. This behavior is completely unpredictable and disrupts layouts that we expected to work seamlessly.

Before this new behavior, I relied on auto layout to organize my designs. I could confidently through a bunch of items, knowing that with just a press of Shift + A, everything would be as expected. However, now Figma attempts to predict how the layout should be, automatically positioning layers to absolute. It takes considerable time to fix each layer that ends up in a different component corner.

Please remove this feature or give us an option to opt out.

This is pretty aggravating, I know this is semantics, but it is particularly aggravating this is being addressed as a feature and not a bug. This isn’t the expected action and slows down the workflow considerably.

Please fix this ASAP.

Hey All, thanks for your votes and continued feedback!

Can you please provide examples of what you’re finding aggravating and are being unexpectedly absolute positioned via a screen recording?

With your examples, we can build a case to advocate for revisiting our current absolute positioning heuristics, especially how we decide to absolute position nodes when using the Shift+A shortcut.