Expand/Horizontal scroll and sort the layers/libraries panel

What do you think about having a horizontal scroll on the layers panel? I can’t see the name of the layers and usually widen the panel to be able to see, but since I use a 13", this makes the canvas smaller.

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Wow, you’ve got a lot of layers… :scream:

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Oh yes :woman_facepalming: One inside another…

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Or at least give me a tooltip when I hover over a truncated layer name.

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very underrated, a must have

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and the layer buttons (lock, view) get hidden as well

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This is also a huge issue for me. We use a lot of library components that are nested and have complex and heavy data UI so there can be a lot of nesting. It’s not always great to keep having to move make the layers panel wider.

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@Figma Please please provide this (horizontal scroll on layers panel, or tooltip on hovering over layer in panel). It is a real blocker to the use of some files for users.

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I’ll add my request here too. This has been asked for over and over again.

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As the title says there are some files with nested layers going so deep, the indent gets too wide:
Here an example from Microsoft’s Teams UI Kit:

While you can expand the width of the layers panel, in this example I have apparently reached the maximum width possible and some layers are still out of reach.

Preferrably Figma would scroll the layers panel automatically to always have layers in view that are cut off. When I deselect the layer in question, it would scroll back to the very left.

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If Figma is going to “grow up” and be a solid enterprise tool, the UI needs some work and this is a big one that shows no one dog foods complex designs on the Figma team or there is a willful ignorance of solid UX for navigating one’s designs.

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I was wondering if there’s a way to see the layer hierarchy in Layers panel when the layer nesting level is too high (20+). As shown in the attached screenshot, I can’t really see the name and hierarchy of some layers.

What I tried: I can’t increase the panel’s width further (there seems to be a limit). I can’t horizontally scroll the panel with my trackpad.

I was wondering if we can do something to fix this issue, e.g. by enabling horizontal scrolling on this panel.

(My instinct is that horizontal scrolling might be nontrivial to implement. E.g. calculating the maximum cell width among all the cells inside the list is time consuming; the list may be using infinite scrolling, so the maximum cell width is not a constant)

Thanks!

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I’m working on a project where I’m building a hierarchical menu next to a data table and the way I’m constructing it is by nesting lists within lists in the layer panel. I know it would be possible to componentise the list but at the moment I need the flexibility to just keep it simple. The problem I have is that the indentation in the layers panel quickly makes it wider than the content so you can’t actually see what is going on.

Hopefully the screenshot crop below shows what I mean:

Does anyone know if it’s possible to make the layers panel wider? My workaround at the moment is to work on the lower levels in the list and then paste them back in to the full list.

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With Autolayout, it’s only gotten worse. They don’t need all that horizontal whitespace.

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I used to make the hierarchy so complex, but then I try to make everything in components, components in components,… (actually not all). It relaxes me so much, I don’t have to care about the detail and the layers panel anymore, now I just edit the main components and it works well, hope it helps you

You can see here, the Layer Panel need a lot of space. I think you should make the indent of childrens shorter.


Thank you!

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Complex UI, large team. We don’t always get that luxury!

totally agree. shorter indent for child layers and/or pop-up tooltip of layer name on hover would make this Layers panel way more usable for day to day work.

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Because the text is too long after the control bar is expanded, I cannot see the text behind it, so I must widen the control bar. I want to set a horizontal scroll bar, or see the whole name when the point is hovering.

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Figma, please do something about it. We need horizontal scrolling in the layers panel.

4 Likes