Describe the problem your experiencing and how your idea helps solve this
When you create an autolayout frame, it always defaults to 10px. Many design systems call for an 8px grid and in many cases, users don’t want ANY padding especially where edge-to-edge designs are concerned.
Ask questions to bring the community into the conversation
What are everyone’s thoughts about the following solutions?:
Default autolayout padding based on the big nudge amount in your settings
Allow for tokenization of padding/margin grids and offer up autolayout parameters based upon those tokens
Allow users to override the padding to 0px at the creation of the autolayout frame by using an alternative key command like ctrl+shift+a (command on mac)
Big fan of 0px padding personally! Most of the time I’m defining spacing between items in an auto layout frame. So 99% of the time I don’t use padding.
For that reason I wouldn’t love the big nudge amount idea because I wouldn’t want to set that to zero. Think your alternative key command is a good one, though I still feel like no padding should be the default!
Just today I was using auto-layout, wrapping individual layers in frames so I could change the alignment, or do X or Y that requires several nested frames. So it does get painful that you have to stop and remove the padding every time.
I don’t think any of the above should be done in isolation. They don’t each solve the whole problem. If anything one or more of these could be done quickly and easily in a simple release while the larger tokenization issue gets addressed. I totally agree about creating AL frames to have to make wrappers in order to set the correct alignments and positioning. I hate having to do it all the time. I just don’t think that setting it to zero by default is the right approach for all cases, the key command though would facilitate that need and a big nudge mapping would allow for a place to set a default as nudges are typically used in the increments that people use for their paddings, etc.
The majority of the time that I set a frame to auto-layout and it automatically adds 10px padding, I have to remove the padding. Ideally this would default to 0.
This can particularly be annoying when the additional padding messes up layout relative to a parent frame’s constraints, and can become more than 1 step to fix.
This is far from ideal, but I usually work around this issue by first wrapping the object in a frame, then adding Auto Layout. Two shortcuts: Alt + Cmd/Ctrl + G, Shift + A.
Gave my vote for having 0 as default unless values can be guessed by Figma. I really like that items that already have even spacing, will have that spacing applied in the AutoLayout frame. I would also like to have Top,Right,Bottom,Left padding values always visible in the inspection panel as I keep having to check them.
Autolayout defaults to 10px padding, and top left alignment.
The alignment particularly annoys me because I only rarely use top left, and so I’m constantly having to change it. It would be great if we could customize the default autolayout settings, perhaps also changing resizing and padding as well. I like the defaults but I am sure there are some use cases where it would be useful to have the auto layout specified in a certain way for a period of time.
You CAN set a default nudge, but currently you cannot tie that to the default autolayout padding functions. Ideally, you could set default nudge and autolayout parameters independently.
I’ve tried to adjust my workflow to use the current defaults and still 99% of the time I use 0 and some factor of 4 as my defaults and then typically centered both horizontally and vertically. I really need this to be an independent configuration like tomorrow. Pleeeaassse.
It seems that Autolayout was changed for when a single object is selected. In this case, 10px padding is added to the autolayout frame.
I often start autolayout by selecting an object and then adding more objects to that frame. Figma has started adding 10px padding this this case, which shifts the position of the object. Autolayout doesn’t add padding when more than one object is selected. Why do that in this case, especially with an arbitrary 10px padding.
Why does autolayout add 10px padding when only one object is selected? It’s annoying that Figma shifts the object’s position on the larger frame and this behavior is inconsistent with autolayout with multiple objects selected.
