Efficient selection of objects in Figma

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Hello Figma Friends,

I am looking for advice on #multi-selection of objects in Figma.

I need to find more efficient ways of selecting objects while in design/brainstorm mode-when I am still playing with type, color, spacing details and need to make both quick universal changes and changes for small groups of items.

I have a few pain points, and would love to hear your solves. Is there is a faster way to multi select? Do you have a better plugin for this task than I have found so far?

I have started removing all auto layout from design frames in order to work more efficiently, but am still spending hours each week making simple select and update changes that could take minutes in Adobe products.

1- Multi selection. In #adobe layout products, one can #select #multi-objects simply by holding shift and quickly selecting the objects. Or by selecting a line weight or color to update overall. This efficient functionality seems to be missing in Figma-or perhaps I need to be dealt in to the best practice in Figma.

2-I often click into a frame 10 times to select the object that I want to update.

3-I find that Figma is constantly grouping objects as I work, and I have to constantly ungroup objects that I have not grouped in order to continue to move them. This makes it very slow to play with composition of items on a page.

Thanks in advance for your wisdom! Let’s get Figma working for us in 2023-Marilee

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Hi!

Here are tricks that I use, especially with deeply nested wireframes (which mine always seem to be).

Command + click selects the clicked item no matter how deeply it is nested. And if that’s a tad deeper than you intend to go, hit backslash (or Shift+Enter) to back selection out a depth level. And if you are still too deep, hit backslash again.

For example, say you have a list item instance, containing an icon and text, that’s 10 levels deep: Command click the icon (so now you’re 11 levels deep) and hit backslash to back selection out a depth level, which will select the whole instance.

This can be done with multi select:

Let’s say you had a series of mobile screens, all containing the instance mentioned above. Even if instance is at differing depth levels across the mobile screens, Command click the first item’s icon, then Shift+command click that icon in the other mobile screens, and hit backslash, which will back out one level in all screens, selecting all the instances.

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Thank you!! Super helpful.