New paste features — simple but big improvements

Hey, everyone! A quick update – we have updated some of the shortcuts based on your feedback:

  • ⌘⇧V or Shift+Ctrl+V should now Paste And Match Style as it did before
  • ⌘⇧V or Shift+Ctrl+V should now Paste Over Selection as it did before
  • the new feature Paste To Replace is now under ⌘⌥⇧V or Shift+Ctrl+Alt+V
  • we’ve also simplified Distribute Horizontal Spacing to Alt+Shift+H and Distribute Vertical Spacing to Alt+Shift+V (on Windows – no change on Macs)

Please let me know if you have any more feedback or suggestions!

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Fantastic news, thank you for listening! Any thoughts on combining Paste Here + Paste Over Selection to improve discoverability and simplify things?

We want to see how the usage patterns evolve with the current system and give it some time to mature. I’d also be curious how the “market share” of PH/POS evolves over time, but it’s too early to say now.

Paste Here and Paste Over Selection do different things and serve different modalities (one prioritizes positioning, the other selection/hierarchy – one goes inside, one goes aside – one is keyboard-centric, one is mouse-centric) and combining them might actually make things harder to understand. For example, in auto layout, PH cannot respect selection because auto layout won’t allow a precise “here.” In other contexts, we think it’s great that PH does auto parenting… which POS doesn’t do by definition.

Let’s keep coming back to this as we get used to the new feature set, and we’ll iterate in due time!

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Ah, that definitely makes sense, especially the difference between nesting behaviors which I haven’t thought about much.

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This is great news, I’m stoked!
You changed the shortcut combination of the new Paste to Replace feature without any notice less than a week after introducing the feature.
How nice.
Not only that, there’s more to it: you’ve also made this update silently without any actual notice (see Figma Releases page), except perhaps this forum page. Makes sense, since everyone is following this thread here.
Good job again.
And wait, you’ve also made it more difficult: because instead of, say, at least keeping it as a combination of 3 keys, it’s a combination of 4 keys now, because why not?
Magic.

Since you’re asking, I do have a suggestion.
Let’s change the Ctrl + C shortcut to Copy as SVG, and use Ctrl + Alt + Shift + FN + WinKey + C to Copy stuff, but don’t tell anyone, let users discover this by themselves.

While we’re here, let’s keep changing things around: have the layers panel on a strip at the bottom of the screen, and the tools bar vertical on the left. Even make a playground file so users can adapt, learn and get proficient using this new Figma interface. And then next week just swap them without saying a word because disruptive changes like this are so much fun.

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I’m sorry about that. We will handle this kind of stuff better in the future.

Is there any way to change this shortcut back? It took a small amount of time but replacing the items on paste was a huge timesaver. The rollback actually makes it less intuitive as I need to add extra fingers to the shortcut (it may seem small, but 100s of times per day it adds up).

it made total sense for me. My default was to paste in place and then tab to the layer below to delete. I know you’re reading the negative feedback, but this was a really smart approach IMO.

I’ve also tried overriding it on the desktop app and it won’t let me assign cmd+shift+v to paste to replace. If you could fix that, I can at least have the shortcut working on the desktop app.

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You can use Better Touch Tool to better change shortcuts across various apps on macOS including Figma. However I won’t recommend replacing Shift + Cmd + V as it is used for paste & match style, better find a different shortcut that works for you.

On a side-note, if you are not ok with the two-hand shortcut, it may be more convenient for you in some cases to use the right-click context menu or the Cmd+/ menu — you can find Paste & Replace command in both of them.

I appear to be alone here - As soon as ‘paste to replace’ was rolled out, I used ⌘⇧V many times every day. I was thrilled. I have never in my life used ‘paste over selection’…what is everyone using it for? I can’t think of any scenario where I would have needed it. Am I missing something in my workflow??

Alas, I am devastated by the new ⌘⌥⇧V for ‘paste to replace’, as I can’t do it with one hand at all. Glad that at least the majority has found the change useful though.

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I was a bit confused. There are still the old shortcuts in the menu (even after update). For context menu it’s right:

…And ⌘⌥V for Paste And Match Style — not ⌘⇧V, right?

Paste to replace is much more useful to me than paste over selection (which I generally do to then delete the thing underneath anyway).

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“Distribute vertical spacing” and “distribute horizontal spacing” have changed the shortcut keys, why not change “Tidy UP” to Alt+shift+T?

In addition, zooming also needs to adjust the shortcut keys.suggestions below:
zoom to selection shift+`(~)
zoom to 100% shift+1
zoom to 200% shift+2
zoom to 300% shift+3
zoom to 400% shift+4
zoom to 50% shift+5
Zoom to fit shift+0

+1 for much preferring the “Paste to Replace” > “Paste over selection” and being really happy to see that update…then bummed to see the shortcut reverted. Even further confused after using it a ton, then suddenly the shortcut not working, and the Edit menu in the desktop app displaying the wrong shortcut.

I personally can’t even think of any example where I’d wanna paste something over another item that I wasn’t just going to delete anyway, so I agree that “Paste over selection” and “Paste here” should be merged. IMO they seek to achieve the same goal: pasting wherever your cursor or selection is.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Paste here shortcut

If anyone is interested in a faster Paste To Replace shortcut, we have added a shortcut (⇧⌘R or Shift+Ctrl+R) that requires fewer fingers. The previous shortcut (⇧⌥⌘V or Shift+Ctrl+Alt+V) will continue to be working, and Paste Over Selection has not been affected by this change.

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I personally use a lot of Paste heres, and would love a quicker way to execute them. Would this work: CMD-V while holding left click on the canvas pastes at the click location.

The current user flow to “Paste here” is:
Right click on a spot → select “Paste here” from the menu item

Normally, when you paste using - Ctrl + v - it just paste in the center of the screen. I think it’d be more user friendly when the copied item can be pasted automatically where the cursor is or where the user has last clicked.

So, here’s my suggested user flow:
Click on a spot → Ctrl + v

It makes the user flow simpler without having to go through the menu.

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