Affinity Designer - Basic Layer Management

[Yves Signer]

Basic Layer Management Improvements

1. Search by name/type/property, select and batch rename layers

2. Search, (re)group, export

3. Collapse All Layer, Expand All

4. Better visual highlighting upon selection (blinking, colour assignment)

I think it's quite essential, I'm surprised it was not implemented yet

 

Edited May 13, 2022 by Yves Signer

[GarryP]

I think most of this has been requested before, for example:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/22880-batch-layer-renamefind-replace-layer-name-shortcut/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/61216-batch-renamer/

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/79482-collapse-all-option-in-the-layers-panel/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/143276-collapse-all-layer-groups-auto-collapse-layer-groups/

… and probably others. Please search first before making new feature requests.

I don’t know what you mean by suggestions 2 and 4.
The more detail you can give in a feature request the better people will understand what you are suggesting.

If you don’t specify exactly what you want, how can the developers know exactly what you want?
And if they don’t know exactly what you want, how can you expect them to implement exactly what you want?

[Pšenda]

On 5/13/2022 at 10:48 AM, Yves Signer said:

Better visual highlighting upon selection (blinking, colour assignment)

I think it's quite essential, I'm surprised it was not implemented yet

So I'm definitely not surprised - I definitely don't want anything to "blinking" on my desktop.

[Customer Feedback]

On 5/13/2022 at 10:48 AM, Yves Signer said:

Basic Layer Management Improvements

1. Search by name/type/property, select and batch rename layers

2. Search, (re)group, export

3. Collapse All Layer, Expand All

4. Better visual highlighting upon selection (blinking, colour assignment)

I think it's quite essential, I'm surprised it was not implemented yet

Hi @Yves Signer

Yes.

It was an unwanted and very unpopular surprise for employees during the evaluation of Affinity in my company that you can't search for layers in the layers panel.

It's such an elementary design flaw that it's a real showstopper. 😞

What has been a puzzle for us is that Affinity is designed to handle thousands of layers with good performance, but the scenario of finding one layer among many, many layers is not considered at all. This perhaps indicates that there are too many engineers involved in the whole development process. This is a mistake the rest of the market has been moving away from for decades, so it is sad to see here.

We are very surprised that developer time has been allocated to putting colours on layers, but not on a search function. Banal colours are no help when working with hundreds of layers or even more. After over 20 years with Google, search is impossible to get around. Having to click back and forth is simply not good enough in 2022.

An example from Adobe where you can search by layer name and other attributes. But just being able to search by name in Affinity could have been a reasonable first implementation.

/Eddie