User Preference to include or exclude object selection in undo

Hello,

When I undo in Figma (history), it goes the whole way back though all the selections and edits, while I’ve never seen any app that considers selections as edits. This feels odd, and it takes much more time to actually undo real edits.

I’d recommend to apply undo only to actions such as “text edit”, “delete”, “move”, “group”, “create”, “color change”, “paste”, etc. But not to simple layer selection.

Thank you.

Agreed, it makes undo incredibly frustrating, and means i have to hit undo an unreasonable amount of times, especially if i am selecting my way into a nested autolayout. i just had to hit undo 8 times to undo an action i did to a complex component because i needed to select thru 7 nested autolayouts in order to get to the last action i just did. SELECTION IS NOT AN ACTION

Please add this option! It adds 2x clicks/actions to my stack every day, all day.

I really want this.
Both methods have their own advantages.
Personally, the current way makes too many small mistakes. So painful.

I am frustrated with Figma right now. I want to undo a last action of resizing something however ctrl + z doesn’t seem to be working the same way as before. I can’t now see what undo’s I am doing based on this. I just want to be able to work the way I used to before. So it should be a preference thing not just a change Figma thinks will make everyones workflow better.

It is definitely very annoying and frustrating to be “undoing” clicks. If this is a loved behavior, at least please let us set a preference so that item selections are not considered undoable / redoable actions.

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I was asked why I prefer to have selection included in the undo history. Here are my reasons:

1. If you click in the wrong spot while doing a complex multi-layer selection, you don’t need to start over in Figma (drives me insane in other apps).

2. Moving around the pages and canvas selecting different frames, then being able to easily go back if necessary.

So both of these are obviously about selection/navigation. They are not really a part of a regular undo flow.

This suggestion therefore is not really about “we need an option for that” but more about “let’s get rid of this feature but keep it as an option in case someone wants it”.

With these things in mind, I believe there is an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. A popular suggestion on the forum is Quickly go to last visited page and back. It’s pretty much what I currently use Undo history for sometimes.

So I’m thinking: why not combine selection/navigation history into one thread and separate it from the undo history? This way workflows I described would still be available at all times without the need to enable/disable any options. And navigation wouldn’t disrupt the undo history. The navigation/selection back/forward actions should obviously be available with shortcuts and probably with the UI buttons too.

This issue is singularly so annoying and bizarre that I am in the process of switching away from Figma.

Was this ever implemented in Figma? This is one of the major reasons that keeps my team from moving to Figma since the current way (including layer/object selections in undo) makes the application too difficult to work in.

Is there a way we can manually turn off selections as edits while undoing?

I just starting using Figma a few days ago, and this is one thing I found super frustrating. I found my self undoing multiple times because of selections. Specially in prototyping, when the majority of my selections was to view interactions, and having to undo about a dozen times just to undo one actual edit. It would be great if we had an option to not include selections in undo.

This reminds me of when Adobe changed the Free-Transform a few years back, where you didn’t have to use Shift to constraint proportions (trying to use mobile patterns in desktop). What a mess it was until they finally gave users the option to use it how it had always been.

New Figma user here. Not to sound too dramatic but I find this bizarre! 🙂 Sometimes I undo 10 times just to get to reverse the desired action. Experienced Figma users might have gotten used to it but this is definitely not according to expectations set by all other tools (not just design). My second expectation was to find a setting to toggle between undo containing everything and undo only actions. I see a lot of people here had the same 2 expectations. C’mon Figma, make our lives a bit easier 😉

For now I really really really need this feature than other features

This is so essential, please fix. Or make it optional at least, so @Gleb could keep his workflow.

So 2 years and nothing? This should change. Make it optional?

My main issue with this is that if for some reason I need to go WAY back… undo a ton of actions to go back to a previous state if I change my mind on a big sweeping change… then I run out of undos really quickly and can’t go as far back as I needed.

Welcome to the monopoly world of UI Design Tools 👽

So, will we get any update on this? This is so annoying. @Gleb That’s nice if it suits your workflow, but that’s obviously not what your users want.

I can’t believe this hasn’t been addressed. It’s such a weird choice and there are obviously so many users annoyed with this. Just putting my vote in to make this a toggleable setting! Should be a no-brainer

Hey All, thanks for the feedback!

We’ll continue to pass this along to our team for future consideration.

I find that you get lost very quickly when the selection is included in the history. Real, important changes are lost among an ocean of selections. This process lacks intuitiveness and deviates from the standard observed in all applications, not just those related to interface design. Kindly rectify this issue.

This must be fixed as soon as possible. I really can’t see any reason why selections should be included in undo-history.
Started with Figma 8 months ago, and still surprised about many odd decisions by the Figma team.

OMG this repetitive undo is truly awful. We really do need a preference setting to omit object selection as part of the undo chain.

I’ve been a designer for over 25 years, used and continue to use so many applications in my workflow. I’ve seen apps change and develop and it’s amazing what can be done these days. But I have never, ever come across an app that does this. It’s wasting soooo much time.

Here’s a typical example:

I have a nested component with layered items. The component has 3 grouped items in it, each group containing 3 or 4 other layers items. I move the component across the page, click down into the nested groups to highlight an object. Then I realise I don’t want to move the component across the page. So to simply get the component back to where it was, I now have to undo about 15 times to get it to go back. The worst part is you feel really, really lost in the process. It’s a terrible journey. It’s often quicker to start rearrange your design again than to bother with the undo!! That’s just crazy!!

Seriously - what’s the point in this Figma forum if you are not going to listen to frustrated users. 😦

+1 to everything above. It’s very annoying that Figma keeps the selection states in undo history. I constantly use undo-redo to try out something (e.g. a different color shade), and then want to compare to the previous state. With one change it works, but if I make multiple changes, undoing to the previous state requires many, even tens of ctrl+z presses.

I’ve also used other design/drawing software for many years, and I understand that sometimes a misclick might clear a carefully drafted selection, but it’s still a lot smaller annoyance than constantly going through tens of undo states doing nothing.

Please at least add a shortcut, e.g. ctrl+alt+z / cmd+opt+z, that would skip all the selection states in the undo history and go directly to the latest actual change. Shouldn’t require that much development effort - the undo action must surely know if a history state is selection or something else. (Then just add a user preference to switch it the other way around.)

Chiming in as a web developer here: object selection as part of the undo history is a nightmare. I have to select just about every element in a design file in order to make things “pixel perfect.” Amidst tasks like navigating auto-layouts, investigating components and clicking into nested groups, if I accidentally modify something during that process it’s an insane lift getting back through each and every selection I made just to undo a single errant change.

I’m admittedly using Figma to accommodate coworkers, and I’m doing my best adjusting where Figma decided to break conventions followed by other design programs. That said, this undo object selection sitch has me missing the days working with Inkscape and GIMP.

The most obvious solution, as mentioned time and again by other users here, would be to make this optional instead of mandatory, and I can tell you from my experience that such a change would be more transformative by far than literally anything done as part of Figma’s “dev mode.”