My team exclusively uses Figma as the source-of-truth for implementation across various verticals: product, design engineering… We heavily rely on deeplinks to cross-reference other relevant files, flows, screens or resources to make the hand-off files easier to navigate for engineers.
Our problem is, after clicking a link that leads to another frame in the same file, there’s no way to go back to the previous page: People need to manually navigate the file hierarchy and sections organisation to retrace their steps. Easy when you’re the person who came up with all these flows and know the file org by heart, but hard for anyone else.
A floating action similar to the “Return to instance” button we have when shortcutting to a master component would be ideal. A keyboard shortcut to do that would be good enough. Any thoughts here?
If you are working with local components where all the components and instances are within one file you have this neat “return to instance” snackbar at the bottom.
If you are using external libraries like I’m doing all the time, you don’t have this option.
I think it would be handy and more consistent if we could also have this feature across different files.
Yeah, not a big dealbreaker since you just need to change the tab but with lots of open tabs a nackbar would be even better.
You have a really cool feature - after click on “Go to Main Component” there is a bubble option on the bottom of the viewport “Return to instance”.
I use cross-linking system in the file. It could be good if user will see the similar button when he click on the link to the Frame in the same Figma file)
I use links inside my Figma design files to help people get around and across Pages.
But for people who don’t know the file well, getting back can be tricky.
It would be very useful if Figma provided a “Return to source link” option for links that opened within the same Figma file, that worked in the same way as the existing “Return to instance” function does.
Click a link to go somewhere in the file, and then just click to get back.
Super-useful - and probably not hard to implement?
Move Cursor to new mouse position, based on Bottom Center of Active Window (move cursor to the location of the Return To Instance button)
Left Click
Restore Saved Mouse Position
Other possibilities
This tool works so well that you do not even see the mouse changing position. It really feels like a normal keyboard shortcut and it has saved me so much time.
Similarly I created a shortcut to quickly jump to follow/view profile of another designer in the same file.
Also BTT allows you to create or reconfigure keyboard shortcuts for menu entries that for some reason are ignored when setting them in the regular Keyboard Shortcuts settings in System Preferences.
Game changer for me, until Figma allows for more solid support and flexibility for custom keyboard shortcuts. Give it a try.
My settings in BTT (make sure to adjust to settings that match your particular screen):
@dvaliao Does the mean someone is working on a more elegant way to navigate between master components and instances — a completely different approach which could solve this an many more issues would be a back button/keyboard shortcut to navigate back – and forth.
Shortcut to “Return to instance” would be really useful same way as shortcut to “GO to main component” which was already solved in this forum. Hopefully they add it as well…
Would love to see this happen. We’ve had developers asking for this too. It’s easy as designer to return to previous selection but not for developers. It seems like the “Return to instance” button bar could be used the same way as is used currently when going to a main component.
