Feature: Disabling new auto layout visual handles

Would it be possible to turn off the visual handles for auto layout?

These have been a hindrance for our team because it often happens that we want to resize an element and accidentally drag the new auto layout padding handles instead.

I’m sure it’s helpful to many when sketching and manually editing values by taping a side but it’s not desired by everyone.

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100% agree. @Figma_Support Please allow for this to be disabled. This is a constant nuisance when auto-layouting. Thanks

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@Figma_Support feels like the new update has made this a bit more of an issue

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This is horrible - every time I try to resize something I end up adjusting the paddings - and then need to manually click through to find it and find the correct darn input field in the right-hand panel to put it back to 0 or whatever it was.

I really don’t understand the usefulness of this feature - it’s an autolayout nightmare!

And yeah - I didn’t notice this being a big issue until like a month ago or something - was there a fix that made it worse?

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+1 here. Too often I want to resize a component and end up changing its padding. Maybe require a key to be pressed while dragging to change the padding and let resizing be the default?

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I have been away from Figma for three weeks and came back to this being a huge issue. It slows me down considerably and it is so hard to get it right.

This is not a case of I am used to A and now when I try A, B happens. No. Even knowing that there is visual padding adjustments there I get it wrong most of the time. So annoying!!!

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I actually like being able to change padding from the work area, but it does get in the way some of the time.
Instead of disabling it, no matter through preferences or a toggle, I would rather see an adjustment that makes accidental padding changes go away.

Maybe increase the fuzzyness of the bounding box larger outward so it’s easier to grab coming from outside?

The fuzziness adjustment would be a nice cherry on top. :+1:

Same here. I don’t every use the canvas control to drag padding, so for me it’s not a convenience to have it. It would be great if there would be a setting to disable it using command + / (just like you can enable and disable the drawing of layout grids).

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Seconded! It is annoying.

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I agree, just searched to see if this was already mentioned before making my own post.

I always forget it’s even an option to directly modify the padding here so personally I rarely use it intentionally, but I am constantly attempting to resize something and accidentally changing the padding.

The way it works at the moment if your padding is 16 pixels there’s a huge 16 pixel region where dragging will resize the padding, and a smaller region that will resize the whole element, so it naturally favours padding over resizing (Fitts’ Law yada yada)

image

There’s a few potential options to me:

  • Tweak the logic so it doesn’t overly favour the wrong action
  • Allow users to disable padding drag handles like the title here suggests
  • Only show the handles whilst you have a shortcut key held down
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Those are excellent suggestions. I like the shortcut modifier idea as a way to keep both options without needing to find and toggle a hidden setting.

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