Improve Plugins navigation

Plugin and Widget API Questions
1

Hi all, I plan to develop a plugin to give the possibility to navigate more easily between plugins.

Is it something you could use or not?
Something like this?

Capture d’écran 2023-02-22 à 14.33.39
Capture d’écran 2023-02-22 à 14.33.391420×1252 92.5 KB

Thanks for your answer :slight_smile :

2

Hi Alexiss,

Thanks for wanting to make something to make everyone’s life easier. I’m a bit confused with the screenshot:

  • there are five grey circles under the Plugin title bar. I’m assuming the Plugin title bar means the Plugin is contained within a window within Figma, and it could be dragged around with cursor. If that is the case, then the five grey circles, I assume, represents different plugins that the user could click on and switch between?
  • following the previous bullet point - if these circles allow the user to switch between different plugins within the same overlay window, how would you address the difference between each plugin’s pop-up’s layout? (e.g. one plugin might by default opens a 300x180 window on launch, yet another plugin might by default opens a 600x400 window.)
3

You can make a catalogue of plugins but Figma doesn’t have any mechanisms for plugins to interact with each other. In particular you can’t in any way shape or form launch one plugin with the help of or inside of another one. You can’t even run two plugins at the same time manually. So this idea is only technically possible in the dreams. The only way would be to make a catalogue and the user has to open the native plugins menu and search for plugins manually if they find something they need in your catalogue.

5

No, the idea is not to create a new catalog but to facilitate the navigation between the plugins, so the bar at the top will represent the plugins that the user has selected (his favorites) and he can click on any gray circle to navigate to another plugin.
The window will automatically resize itself

6

Hi, thanks for your answer, I may not have been very clear.
The idea is that indeed the grey dots represent different plugins and when the user will click on one or the other grey dot he will be able to switch to another plugin, thus facilitating the navigation between the plugins.
The plugin window will be automatically resized according to the selected plugin.

7

Your idea is not possible to implement in Figma with the current API.

8

I made a first POC and I succeeded it is quite possible I came here just to know if it would interest people?

9

You might want to check with the Figma team first whether publishing this would violate any Figma rules or plugin devs intellectual property rights (not sure if scraping and running others’ code is ok). If so, sure, this could be useful to people.

10

Do you know how I can get this information?
Who should I contact?

11

Regular Figma support would work

12

I’d like to also note that as a plugin developer I don’t want my plugins to be a part of this. I want users to only use the native plugins system to run my plugins.

13

Hi just wanted to continue this thread to share the plugin : Plugins Navigator [BETA] | Figma Community

It’s still in beta but don’t hesitate if you have any feedback.

Enjoy!

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