Are the automatic auto layout settings frustrating anyone else?

Recently Figma has made changes to how child and parent elements automatically apply auto layout rules when you first add auto layout to them. It seems like Figma is trying to guess what I want my settings to be (fill vs. hug vs. fixed, that kind of thing). When this works it’s helpful, but in practice I find that it’s usually not applying the properties that I want it to apply. I’m having to spend so much time tweaking the AL settings after I press Shift + A and it has finally annoyed me enough that I felt like making a topic about it.

This is especially the case when I’m creating new component sets (I almost always use AL for these) and my components all get set to fill when I want them to remain fixed width, and the component set is set to a fixed width instead of hug. I have to go in and reset all the children to fixed with, and the parent frame to hug, every single time.

I gave it an adjustment phase but after a few weeks I have to say that this is still really bothering me and costing me a lot of productivity and tedium. Just curious if anyone else is feeling similarly.

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Agreed. However, I cannot put my finger on it. I swear it works different every time.

The thing that is most aggravating to me right now is the absolute positioning. Auto layout seems to make things absolutely positioned for no good reason. But not every time. Only when Figma doesn’t know how to properly align things. Figma made some statement about this in a post that basically amounted to “our engineers can’t figure it out so we just had the thing absolute position stuff.”

You are not alone.

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Yes, I don’t want it to be a negative post but the absolute positioning thing is forcing me to detach a lot of components today—I also can’t figure out what exactly causes it because it doesn’t happen all the time. I have some icons inside of button components that sometimes take on absolute positioning and sometimes don’t.

In order to debug they always ask for access to the file and I can’t easily do that with work stuff so it’s never an option for me. And I don’t want to take 5 or 10 minutes to record a bug report video because when I do that I don’t often hear back anyway.

They like to ask for that video! Then they tell you that things are working as they should.

It is literally the worst thing they do! They can’t tell anything from that video and they refuse to provide ACTUAL support. Just emails and making you feel like you are wrong.

Hard to not be negative when support won’t acknowledge when their product is not working properly and they make you feel like you are not doing things right.

If you have a file you want a second set of eyes on, post one here or message me.