Duplicating symbols

[Hjelmstad]

This is both a question and then a feature request, as Im pretty certain the second part can't be done. 

1) With symbols, obviously when making a complicated pattern there's no way I'm going to want to use groups, but rather than dragging the same symbol out of the panel repeatedly, I keep finding myself holding alt and dragging the symbol to duplicate it, and sometimes power duplicate it after that. 

 

But this doesn't create a new symbol. It just makes a group. Is there a way to make it duplicate as a symbol?

 

2) This has caused an issue where I sometimes absent mindedly find myself making groups and not symbols. So, as I dont think this exists, Designer needs a "find and replace" function, as all the groups in question are identical, and they are identical to the symbol, other than their orientation, which is important because "select same" doesn't work as the widths and heights wont be the same, given that their orientations vary, and color is not necessarily a reliable thing here either, as many things will share the same color (although in other contexts I have very methodically used colors varying by like a single point in blue just so that I can select them all later, but this still has weaknesses because editing them all doesnt necessarily work out when they lose some sort of symmetry with themselves due to their orientation and I try to transform them after that)

[NotMyFault]

12 hours ago, Hjelmstad said:

I keep finding myself holding alt and dragging the symbol to duplicate it, and sometimes power duplicate it after that. 

 

But this doesn't create a new symbol. It just makes a group. Is there a way to make it duplicate as a symbol?

This would be a bug in Designer. 
on iPad, I get a new instance of the symbol which is as expected (correct)

Can you provide a screen recording? Please have the layer panel visible. When using mouse and alt-drag, it is important that the symbol was chosen, and not e.g. a group inside a symbol.

for clarity: you want to get

• multiple instances of the existing symbol, or
• add a new independent symbol?

[steday]

Hello

If I understand clearly your question :

If you want to create a symbol made of several shapes, you have to group them before creating a symbol, because if you don't do that, every shape will be a symbol.

Alt + dragging, copy-pasting, power-duplicating a symbol create a symbol. You won't see them individually in the symbol panel because these new symbol are instances of the first symbol you create, and every instance are synchronized bu default (if you modify one, all the synchronized instances will be modified - you can de-synchronized some instances if you want to edit them with different color, shape. Transformed instances with scale, rotation, keep synchronisation ).

You can see in the layer panel that a group is a symbol if it has an orange bar. See attached.

See Affinity doc on symbol for more infos.

All of this work correctly on Affinity Designer 2.6 Mac.