Samuel Fabayo shows how Figma's new multi-edit feature lets you change text, colors, and sizes across multiple frames at once. Select matching layers with a button or keyboard shortcut, then edit them all together instead of one by one.
Hello everyone. Figma just launched an incredible new feature that people have been requesting for a long time now. It's the multi-edit feature that allows users to edit, align, and resize multiple elements across multiple frames of the canvas. Let's get into Figma to see how this works. So yes, we are on Figma now, and if you look at this particular file, this is a simple education app for kids. You can find the link to this file in the description so that you can follow along if you want to. If I click this element and I do this, you can see that it is resizing everything across all the 4 frames of this element. That looks incredible, right? That wasn't a feature that we had in Figma before. Before, if you wanted to do this, you had to go into all the different frames to make those changes, or you had to select everything across different frames to make those changes. So imagine you had 30 frames. It is going to be really difficult to make those changes across all 30 frames. Now let me show you how this works exactly. I'm going to start with a very, very simple example. Let me bring up a frame here. And inside this frame I have 3 rectangles and I also have 2 circles, right? I always love my auto layout, so I'm gonna put these rectangles into auto layout. If you don't know how auto layout works, I have a video that I've done on auto layout, so you can see it up there. Check out the video as well. So I'll put this into auto layout as well, right? So let's say I want to change the color of this frame to red, and then I want to change the color of this particular one to back, and I want to change the color of this one to another color. Say this is going to be green, and then these circles are both going to be yellow, right? So I have all of this. Let's say I duplicate this across 4 frames and I want to make changes to this particular red frame. I want to make the change across. Before, what I have to do is to click this, come in here, click this, come and click this, click this, and click this, and then make those changes. But now with this new editing multi-edit tool, all I need to do is click the first frame and click this button at the top here which says Select Matching Layers. Once I click this icon, it is going to select all the layers that are the same thing as this particular layer, all the layers that are matching across different frames. And then I can pick that and change the color to any particular color that I want, right? Another way to select is if I come here and and I pick this and I hold Shift, all the other ones are automatically highlighted so that it can show me that these are the other layers, these are the other rectangles, or these are the other elements that look like this first one that you've selected. Would you like to make any changes to them? And if I want to do that, all I just need to do is while I'm holding Shift, I drag across the frame so that it selects all those ones and I can make the same changes that I want to make to them. By changing it to blue. I can even decide to resize them if I want to, right? You can see that that is happening across all the frames, which is, which is really interesting and which is really incredible as well, because this is going to improve your workflow as a designer. It's going to make you work faster. So now let's leave this example. Let's delete this example and go back to our educational app. And now I have like the duplicate of this app across 4 frames. So let's say that for some reasons I feel like, hmm, I'd like to increase the size of this particular first element here, Biology. I'd like to increase it and I want to increase it across all the other frames. All I need to do is hit Biology and hit K so that it can resize everything together. And once I do that, I'm going to pick the icon, Select Matching Layers, and I can resize it if I want to. And you can see that it resizes everything. Across all the frames. Also, another way to select matching layers aside from holding Shift is to pick the first layer and hit Command+Option+A on Mac. I'll show you what it looks like on Windows on the screen there. Once you do that, you can also make the same change to resize it if you want to. That is for resizing. Another thing that you can do is to edit text across multiple frames, which I think is like the most popular use case that you would come across, because that happens a lot where designers want to edit text across multiple frames and they have to be doing it one after the other. So I can come here and say that I want to come into this particular assigned lessons component at the bottom here, and I want to change reproduction across all the frames to something else. And this is not a component, right? Because if it was a component and a variant of each other, it's so easy to do because you've already created a component and you can edit across. But in cases where you haven't actually created a component for this, it makes it super easy as well. So another thing I can do is, let's say I want to change reproduction to cell biology, for example. I don't know why cell biology came to mind. So I'm gonna pick reproduction and do the same thing. When I pick reproduction, I'm going to hit Command+Option+A to select everywhere that I have reproduction, and I'll hit Enter, and then it highlights the first reproduction text so that I can edit that text. So that text is editable now. So if I enter cell biology, you see that it's actually changed everything across all the frames, which I think is absolutely fantastic. I think this is a game changer. It's such a small feature that really 10x's our workflows as designers. Another interesting thing that you can do with this is to use it in the auto layout feature. For example, Let's say I want to move this cell biology to the 3rd frame here, right? I can do the same thing. Click the cell biology element itself, the entire element, and hit Command Option A. And once I do that, I can move it across. So yeah, like I said, you can have access to this file. You can download this file, and I would love to see how you also try to use this new feature in your workflow. That'll be all from me. You can also watch another video I made on how to use Auto Layout. Don't forget to hit the like button on this video and subscribe to my channel for more videos like this. I'll see you in the next one.
