How to navigate between sibling layers?

Currently, you can press enter to go down one step in layers, and shift-enter to go up. That’s really useful, but completely pointless when there’s multiple layers at same level, and you need to select only one of them.

Is it possible to somehow select only first in the list, or navigate to next sibling? Because right now, when I enter into a deeper layer, it selects all layers within making any kind of manipulation impossible.

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Yes, you can press Tab to select first/go to next and then Shift + Tab to go backwards.

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That only seems to work on single selection, not on multiple, bit of a weird restriction. Otherwise it would’ve been perfect.

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It works if you select multiple objects in one parent. For example you press Enter to select all children, and then you can press Tab to select the first one. Regarding the limitation — you can file a feature request in the #product-ideas category. :slight_smile:

Yeah, I do not know why Tab does not work on multiple selections, but I wrote this code to achieve that. You can paste this code into your Figma Console to see this in effect, and if you like it, you can even make a tiny local plugin and bind the ⇥ and ⇧⇥ short cut to it using BetterTouchTool.

To go upward use:

let currentSelection = Figma.currentPage.selection;
let newselection = []
currentSelection.forEach(element => {
let index = element.parent.children.indexOf(element)
if (index < element.parent.children.length - 1) newselection.push(element.parent.children[index + 1])
});
if (newselection.length > 0) {Figma.currentPage.selection = newselection}

To go downward use:

let currentSelection = Figma.currentPage.selection;
let newselection = []
currentSelection.forEach(element => {
let index = element.parent.children.indexOf(element)
if (index > 0) newselection.push(element.parent.children[index - 1])
});
if (newselection.length > 0) Figma.currentPage.selection = newselection

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Thanks a bunch! I haven’t tried making plugins before and I’m on Windows so can’t use BetterTouchTool, but will look into it, might be good time to learn!

It’s so weird how random features just stop working in certain context in Figma, feels like a bug :sweat_smile:

I agree this needs to happen. I created a Product idea post here if anyone finds this thread and wants to vote on this request:

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So, I took liberty to use the @Mr.Biscuit code and turned it into plugin. I need to style it, and would like to publish it with permission, ofc. Here is how it works…

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Here it is. A simple as it can be, but mucho useful :wink:

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Awesome Mihael! That would be a real lifesaver :smiley:

@Svarry We released the plugin :confetti_ball:

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Thanks much Mihael, this will save so much time :smiley:

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