Symbol naming & identification / Usability Improvement

[krsdcbl]

I'm (finally) in the process of changing over to Affinity & getting rid of Ai/PS in my main workflow, so I'm coming across a lot of little UI/UX details that sometimes just work differently (most often better!), but sometimes feel a bit rough around the edges or hard to work with - this is one of the latter, concerning symbol creation & references in the UI:

UX inefficiency: naming symbols
Subjective / workflow-dependant take: I couldn't care less about naming my layers and groups when iterating & drafting, that's a clean up step for me. But when creating symbols, I have some kind of structured intent & would like to keep them organized from the start.

Currently this is tedious, since their names default to "Symbol", there's no option to get prompted as with layers, and you also have to you can't double click the symbol name in the panel, you have to right click & select "rename".

Workflow complication: identifying symbols
Also, there seems to be no way to quickly & reliably identify which symbol an instance in the layers panel actually is, making it difficult to understand which symbol from the panel I am editing at any given time:

• Naming the symbol in the panel doesn't affect the symbol name in the layers, as well as the other way round -> which is good, that should be independent
• But the layer panel also doesn't reflect which symbol is represented, they seem "unlinked"
• Dragging a named symbol onto the canvas just falls back to calling it "Symbol" in the layers, regardless of its actual name

And there seems to be no tool or way to highlight instances of a symbol from the symbol panel, or identify other instances of the same symbol in the layer panel either, effectively disconnecting the symbol from its instance in the UI for the user, making it quite confusing to work with multiple instances of similar symbols

(example: I'm using symbols as a workaround for creating repeating patterns with vectors, and am absolutely lost when trying to track which variant of similar looking "pattern tile symbols" is used where, because they're organized in my symbols panel, but all of them just get called "Symbol" in the layer when inserting. Best solution I could find was to group the individual symbols contents, name that group, then name each symbol after its root-group in the panel, and now still need to work with a fully expanded layer tree to see the names)

Ideas for solutions

• Show the symbol name greyed-out in brackets next to the symbol layer name, regardless of how the layer is renamed
• When selecting a symbol layer:
  • Highlight the corresponding symbol in the symbols panel
  • Display the symbols name in the toolbar instead of "Symbol", like with linked files
• Provide an option in settings to get asked for a name when creating a symbol, separate from asking for layer/group names
• When double-clicking the symbol name in the panel, open the rename dialogue
• When double-clicking the symbol thumbnail in the panel, select & focus the first instance of that symbol
• (maybe allow for traversing the instances by repeated double-clicking, or provide controls to step through or highlight the instances?)

I could imagine that some of these might be not too complex to integrate (like highlighting selected symbols, or displaying their name alongside their layers name) - but they would tremendously improve the UX when setting up more complex workflows that use a lot of symbols.