When dragging objects, I only want them to nest into a frame when the frame is used as a “screen” or the main frame of the composition.

I almost never want to drag an object unconsciously to end up in a frame, unless it is to enter the main frame of the composition.

Currently, the way to avoid this behaviour is to drag and press “spacebar”, which is counterintuitive and slowing down my process. Also, it doesn’t “force” an object to enter a frame, which is the most common behaviour I’d want, to force an object.

For this, I would personally would like to be able to invert this shortcut in order to use it when wanting to consciously nest an object in a frame, but never have the surprise to drag an object to see it randomly nested.

Does anyone else experience this?

I often use redlining, sticky notes, etc to markup design files in Figma. These objects are conceptually separate from the actual UI in the frames I’m building but sometimes make sense to overlay on top of my designs. I know there is functionality to hold the spacebar and have the object ignore the drag/drop into frames functionality. However, this is a bit cumbersome and has to be done every time I want to move something around. I also know that locking a frame would stop this from happening, but I often want to edit the frame at the same time that I am doing markup.

I would like an option, maybe a checkbox, to say “make this object ignore frames”. With this option enabled, I can move the object however I see fit without worrying that it may drop into a frame accidentally. All copied versions of this object would respect this rule, until disabled.

Are there any other approaches that I am not considering? Does anyone else experience this? Does anyone else agree that an option to tell an object to always ignore frames would be useful?

1000% this. 👆

While in theory auto-nesting sounds awesome, in practice it’s actually quite troublesome and an unexpected behavior. No other visual editing or design tool works like this (including Photoshop, upon which Figma bases it’s layer-ordering mechanics), so auto-nesting actually actually more of an anti-pattern since it bucks convention without good reason.

Auto-nesting is an added behavior, so it should be treated as such. Holding down spacebar (or some other key) to enable auto-nesting makes total sense in this context. Last I saw this this issue came around 2019 and has yet to be addressed. Would love to see a fix for it soon.

When I wrote the now years-old Spectrum post linked above, the spacebar feature had not been implemented. I’ve gotten used to the spacebar workaround but agree that it should’ve been the other way around. And auto-reparenting can be useful in many cases, especially when placing objects within auto layout stacks.

Now that I and plenty of other Figmates are used to it, though, it would be an adjustment if Figma switched up the default behavior. So I would like this to be a setting… Like “Reverse spacebar auto-reparenting” which would flip the spacebar to be the keyboard shortcut to enable auto-reparenting while dragging.

Totally agree with the comments expressed here.

From a UX perspective if I create an object that lives in the top layer and need to move it into position, shouldn’t I expect it to always be on the top layer by default wherever I move it!

It’s as if Figma is making creative choices without my permission by deciding to randomly group my top layered object with an object below. And it’s even more strange because the user action I am performing is moving an object on the x y plane. This x y plane movement action has nothing to do with changing layer depth or being moved to a group.

As suggested already, nesting should be an opt-in action.

Most often I am moving objects to position them, not to nest them.

Just joining in to get more voices behind ‘inverting’ this feature. It sounds powerful/useful on paper, but is awkward in reality, really slowing down the design process.

I can’t spend 90% of my day holding the spacebar.

Yes, Did they fix this? I think when I select a Frame, there will be an option to turn on/off auto-nesting of only this frame. Sometimes when a frame is “closing” I don’t want any more children in it.

They can add an option in Settings where you can choose if you want this “feature”.

I see there are a lot of requests for this feature but doesn’t seem like its addressed still?

I am glad I read this post. Good to know I can hold the space bar to prevent nesting. But i also agree this should not be primary behavior. It can be so frustrating sometimes.

My wrist is hurting from constantly holding spacebar. This “feature” is a dark pattern and should instead be opt-in. It’s unreasonable to force everyone to use the workaround with spacebar.

Is there a setting for this yet? it’s driving me insane

I totally agree, this should be an opt-in feature.

A key combination can be used to allow for auto nesting instead of disabling it.

Just like everyone else here, I find auto-nesting an unintuitive waste of time, energy, concentration and nerves. I can’t understand why anyone would come up with such an idea and get support for it.

Figma: Do a usability test on 5 participants and see if they ‘get it’.

Not sure if reverting it solves the issue but nonetheless I agree with auto-nesting being quite annoying and troublesome.

This feature should be opt-in with a key press.

It’s super frustrating that you can’t create a new text layer, in a specific folder, by click-dragging. It tries to nest the layer in a frame.

It should only auto-layer-sort when holding CMD on mac or CTRL on Windows, for instance.

I’m finally annoyed enough with the interaction to actually write something down about this. And YES!!! Please reverse this interaction to have it enabled when I’m holding down the spacebar. Or at the very least, give us the option to turn it off in the preferences.

I would love this. The logical pattern to me (and other POVs I’ve read here) is that it should be reversed (i.e. hold space to auto-nest) but I understand that it would then be in opposition to a known method. So let’s get that preference to switch it!

This was something that really hurt me when first learning Figma.

To mitigate the space bar and dragging I think is easier to just cut the element (command + and select where you wanna place it and hit (command + Shift + V) this prevents the standard behavior of pasting, so if I were to select an auto layout and hit cmnd + shift + v, Figma will paste this element as a sibling, next to that auto layout, and not inside. I use this command 95% of the time.

Thanks for sharing, @Mojo . I think many of us use the same approach as you’ve described as an alternative to holding the space bar, but unfortunately, the pain is still there.

When you paste an item like that, it ends on top of the selected object, usually in the top left corner. Afterwards, it’s still needed to move/nudge the object to its desired location from where it was cut and later move it to its preferred group. When you multiply this process with the number of times you want to move an object, the time spent on such simple action during the day is ridiculous.

Another alternative is to right-click and choose “Paste here”, but that’s also not a great command for the intended action.

If you think the Figma team should look into this auto-nesting feature, please vote at the top of this page to help get it noticed.

@Stefan_Pilipovic coyld it be you are confusing command + v with command + shift + v? I’m not getting the nested behavior you are describing, maybe I’m confused, but since I’ve discovered this shortcut is the glory

@Mojo not confusing the commands.

When using CMD+SHIFT+V it’s not auto-nesting the pasted object into the frame/group that is selected but pastes it on top of it (or above all frames if nothing is selected), positioned in the top left corner. So it solves the auto-nesting problem.

But the problem is that after that I need to move the object to the originally desired position (since it’s now pasted in the top left corner), and then re-order/move the layer in the list to put the object back in the group from which it was originally cut off. Hope this makes sense, but let me know if I’m missing anything.

This is the exact issue I have with using shift-cmd-v for this purpose. I use shift-cmd-v a lot when needed (to literally paste over selection), but I don’t want to cut > paste > move instead of dragging.

Agree with folks on this thread. Using Figma is like riding one of those bikes where, when you steer to the right, the front wheel steers left. It does the opposite of what I want it to, and it is causing me to lose my mind. I appreciate the collaborative nature of this product - it’s a game changer. But the UI is seriously awful.

There is literally NEVER a time where I want an object to auto-nest into a group below it. NEVER. Yet the designers at Figma decided that EVERYONE ALWAYS wants to do this. Figma has lots of serious UX issues but this one is off-the-rails bad.

Please fix this @Figma_Support it really is the worst feature. It makes sense to hold SPACE to drop into a group, etc… but not as a default. It really drives me crazy on a daily basis.