New features for Symbols and Symbols Panel

[hperticarati]

I really like the responsiveness and immediate feedback about symbols in Affinity.

But managing them is not as easy as it could be, much of that happens because of the lack of some functionalities in Symbols panel.

 

What I'd love to see in an updated version of the Symbols Panel:

• List view
• Custom categories to groups symbols
• Search bar
• Ordering options: manual, alphabetical
• Easier renaming: select one, double click the name, and when finished, press tab to rename the next one

 

Features to manage symbols in the artboard:

• Contextual menu to replace a selected instance of a symbol in the artboard by another one on the library
• Option to, when cmd+click on the symbol, do not select it's layers, but the whole symbol.
  • (This is useful when you want to select a symbol inside a complex hierarchy of groups and layers, but do not want to edit the symbol.)

 

Other advanced features

• Ability to nest symbols inside symbols
• Ability to override nested symbols

 

Well, this is what I'd like to see regarding symbols. I hope that this adds something to the discussion about the roadmap.  

[Fatih19]

The first part of this thread seems pretty easy, development should implement it right away. 

[Tim Gummer]

plus one on all of those things, but i don't expect it should take focus from current development

[A_B_C]

Hmm … symbols nested to symbols … that should be possible already (see attached) … or you have something entirely different in mind … 

 

Symbols-Nested.mov

 

[Aammppaa]

@A_B_C @hperticarati Nested symbols are indeed currently possible, but they are very buggy indeed! The nesting often breaks one or both symbols (orange line in Layers panel becomes dashed) or the symbol simply vanishes (at which point Undo will not bring it back).

 

Nested symbols are a key feature for me in my work, and at present it is a real struggle to use them

[hperticarati]

50 minutes ago, Aammppaa said:

@A_B_C @hperticarati Nested symbols are indeed currently possible, but they are very buggy indeed! The nesting often breaks one or both symbols (orange line in Layers panel becomes dashed) or the symbol simply vanishes (at which point Undo will not bring it back).

 

Nested symbols are a key feature for me in my work, and at present it is a real struggle to use them

 

Yes, that is precisely what I had in mind... afyer having all my symbols unlinked from master a bunch of times, I’m kinda stucked in the decision of re importing all symbols (which is going to be a lot of work, considering that some of them should have been updated with changes I made directly in their instances), or switching to another tool tha handles symbols with more stability. 

 

So maybe, instead of asking for “nested symbols”, the key words should be “a more stable symbol workflow”.

[pixy]

Totally agree. The Symbols feature definitely needs much better management features. All we can do right now is to either rename or delete symbols... wow 😕