Temporarily hiding selection outlines

surprised this hasn’t been implemented yet – want & need it tbh ⚡

hopefully they can incorporate it 🍃

All: Make sure you’ve voted for this idea. 3 years later and this popular feature is still not implemented… I wonder if there is some technical issue getting in the way due to the in-browser context (pressing a keyboard key causes conflicts). @Gleb any thoughts on how difficult this would be to implement?

That should be a basic feature, every major software does this and it should be very easy to implement, like a temporary esc shortcut

They already have a mechanic to hide the outlines when you make changes to objects. So it should be easy. I can also make a plugin for this and you can set it to run via a shortcut if you are on Mac.

Indeed one would think it should be easy, right?

Hey I’ll take the plugin 🙂 Why only on Macs? On Windows there is a utility called Autohotkey (https://www.autohotkey.com/). Would it be able to utilize the plugin?

Are you able to configure it to run a plugin?I know a way by running search and entering the plugin name but it’s not very smooth so I don’t know if anyone even uses or wants it this way. Do you know a better way or is this method ok?

Sorry I might be confused. Were you talking about making a Figma plugin to do this? If so, why would it not work on Windows?

I’m talking about configuring a shortcut to run the plugin. The plugin would work everywhere but I doubt it would be convenient on Windows unless you can add a shortcut with AHK. So I’m asking how do you set a shortcut to run a plugin with AHK?

AHK can do various actions on any hotkey or hotkey combination, even within only specific apps: How to Write Hotkeys | AutoHotkey v2

Initially I thought the Figma plugin you were thinking of would have to be run manually via the traditional way, but then would be running “invisibly” in the background and listening for a given key (which could be user-defined) that would hide the selection outlines, etc.

But if you can launch the plugin via a user-defined keyboard shortcut then even better 🙂

That’s not really feasible in Figma due to the limitations of the API.

Yes, but you can only configure said shortcut on Mac. I understand the capabilities of AHK and as far as I know the only way it could run a plugin is: 1. Press Ctrl + P to open search. 2. Type the name of the plugin. 3. Press Enter. This is an ok process but sounds a bit annoying having this 1 second delay of AHK doing all these actions every time you want to run it.

Oh, btw I realized something: do you want to hide outlines and then continue changing the objects while the outlines are hidden? The only way a plugin can function is by deselecting everything and then getting the selection back. This means you can’t edit objects while the outlines are hidden because you don’t have selection. You can already automate this with AHK and on macOS with BTT much easier: just press Esc to deselect everything and then press Cmd/Ctrl + Z to get selection back. No need for a plugin.