Menu Item / Shortcut to add frame to selected layer

Picking up on this: Add a shortcut to quick insert a frame into a selected frame

Once you start thinking in terms of Autolayout, it’s often easier to build your complex objects from the “outside in”, for example, you think of the outside frame and know you need to split it into two horizontal columns, so you create an empty frame and immediately apply Autolayout. Then you proceed to add two empty frames to that for your two columns, and continue that way.

Unfortunately, as the hierarchy gets complex, adding new frames inside existing ones becomes a challenge because we only have 2 ways to create a frame right now:

  1. Working from the inside-out, select child objects and choose “Frame Selection” to create the Parent frame, and
  2. Use the Frame drawing tool and draw a frame on the canvas

Option 1 defeats the purpose of this post because it’s working from the inside out

Option 2 rarely works the way you want because it’s up to Figma to decide where in the hierarchy that frame you drew is going to appear. Sometimes it gets it right - most of the time it’s inside the wrong element of the hierarchy and then dragging it into the correct element can become a challenge.

I’m proposing, as @Stephen3 suggested, that you simply select the layer you want the frame inside and choose Insert Frame.

The frame will be created and inserted into that element, and positioned according to the rules of the parent element.

If it’s just a frame or a group, then it gets inserted top right and has an arbitrary width and height (we could say 100px x 100px)

If it’s an Autolayout frame, then it gets inserted according to autolayout rules and I’d suggest the default be Fill / Fill to start with.

2 posts were merged into an existing topic: Add a shortcut to quick insert a frame into a selected frame

Hey there, thanks for your feedback!
I’ve merged your topic with an existing similar one you mentioned from the community.