First off, I can not stress enough how happy I am with the recently announced 32 updates! Marvelous work, it’s indeed the little things! Thanks so much!
I’m afraid though that one of the changes might have (most likely unintentionally) interrupted a workflow that I got used to so much since the very beginning of using Figma, which is: the search bar in the “Swap instance” menu no longer allows for searching in all libraries by default. This might sound like nothing, but it becomes more and more frustrating the more I stumble upon it. Here’s why.
Working with multiple libraries and the placeholder/slot components technique on a daily basis, I keep my placeholder component in a separate library called “Utilities”. Whenever I want to swap a placeholder with another component, 99% of the time it’s a component living in another library, eg. “Web components” in my case.
Over the years of using Figma, what I came to expect is that whenever I open up the “Swap instance” menu, the search bar is (a) autofocused and (b) ready for me to begin searching in all enabled libraries.
Instead, what I end up doing now is more or less the following:
I open up the “Swap instance” menu,
Immidietaly I begin typing in the name of the component I want to swap the current one with,
I get confused by not seeing it in the list of results,
I open up the library picker,
I click on the name of the library (that is, if I happen to remember in which library the component I want to find is stored within, right?),
I click again, as the first click never seems to be registered, or maybe it’s just loading in the background (I don’t know, either way, I’m fairly irritated at this point )
I finally select the component I was looking for.
And so I’m wondering if anyone else feels this way or is experiencing this inconvenience the same way I do, and — if that’s true — whether there’s some room for improvements on this matter?
The new adjustment to the swap component library is really inconvenient to my teams workflow.
I am not sure why this change occurred as when you search for a specific component - the query should find pretty close to what you are looking for as long as you have the component named properly.
The library in which the component is used in only searches for other components within that library.
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My use case is as follows:
Create a custom input in the local file - Input / Stage Name
Shift + I to find my initial base component - for example a form which includes a label on the left and a content area that holds inputs on the right.
Select the swappable instance for an input that is baked into the form component
Select the swap component feature from the design panel
Search for local component
This is where the breakdown happens. I have to select to look through the local component library instead of searching the design system library since the swap-able component lives within the design system library.
Please revert back as I really do not see how this change makes sense when using swap-able base components.
It took me a little while to realize what was going on… I just thought it was broken but couldn’t figure out why this was happening, then after a few coworkers said something I’m like ahh yeah that is the issue.
The worst is like both above had said, when you’re working with components from multiple libraries both local and external 9/10 times it’ll recommend the wrong library that you need to pull/search from.
I keep telling myself that I’m just getting used to it, might seem odd at first and then it’ll become normal. I’ll have that aha moment where I figure out the intention behind this particular feature, but for now that moment has yet to come.
It is seriously infuriating having to all the time to change the search to “all libraries”. Why would I only want to search the local one? We have components named differently for a reason.
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