Skip to main content
Brooke_White
Brooke_White
New Member
June 4, 2024

Re-order auto-layout without detaching

  • June 4, 2024
  • 5 replies
  • 819 views

Would be great if there was a way to be able to change the sort/order in which auto layout components are shown, without having to detach or redo all the work to edit the components.

For example:
eg. using a table or list component, and being able to move row 3 to be row 4.

Current native experiences forces you to either:

  1. Detach the component (not ideal) and resort
  2. Redo all the content for both rows 3 + 4

Neither of these are ideal from a system or efficiency perspective.

    5 replies

    djv
    Figmate
    djv
    Community Support
    June 5, 2024

    Thanks for the feedback, @Brooke_White!

    We’ll pass this onto our team for future consideration.

    Desiree_Dahlson
    Desiree_Dahlson
    June 27, 2024

    THIS. Re-doing the work or being forced to detach is my biggest headache of any of Figma’s limitations. It causes so much work to be wasted. This and similar auto-layout changes to components has been requested by users multiple times over the years, a quick Google search will pull up multiple other related posts in the forum.

      Omar6
      Omar6
      September 19, 2024

      it is super helpful for multilingual design systems, where text order can switch between rtl and ltr.

      Mikaela V.
      Mikaela V.
      New Member
      October 9, 2025

      I cannot upvote this enough, say for example I have a dropdown menu component, many of our platform’s options menus share similar options e.g.

      Most of the main feature menus have: Overview, Add [Insert feature name], Statistics, Reporting, Utilities, Settings. Then most of our sub feature menus have: Add [Insert object name], Edit [Insert object name],  Delete [Insert object name], etc. 

      The issue is there are always options in the menu between these common ones based on the other options that are individual to a feature/sub-feature, and the total number of options may vary. 

      If I were to detach the component to get around this, then I would lose the components state variables when I am using it e.g. being able to toggle between whether or not it is enabled, hovered, selected etc. for my wireframes and prototypes. I could just add placeholder options in the middle of the main shared ones and hide these when I don’t need them but its messy and inflexible. I also don’t want to have to create a dedicated component for each feature and sub-feature dropdown we have as that defeats the purpose of creating re-usable components…

      That is just one example of when I encounter this issue but I also encounter it with other use-cases. Surely we can’t be the only users frustrated by this.

        Bree1
        Bree1
        New Member
        December 3, 2025

        This pleaseeeee!! How is everyone working around this with grid layouts, I want my grid of items to be a component so that I can change it from 3-col to 2-col etc but then I cannot change the order of the grid items without detaching

        Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement