Athens update - The Symbols toolbar icon has disappeared

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Hi,
Updated to Athens last night.. so far so good - except..

The Symbols toolbar icon is gone and replaced by the Sketch Insert menu drop down. It is essential for our work to quickly select our custom library components.. and there were a few issues.

There used to be a diamond shaped Symbols icon on the toolbar and it’s is no longer available in the ‘Customize toolbar’ options. It was 1 click to get to the library.

This is key functionality… I found the Symbols under the Sketch Logo/Insert, but so far it seems like 3 more clicks to get to the symbol library. It at least seems to remember where you left off. But the previews are huge.. you can see about 10 things in the small popup dialog. At first I thought I was stuck with a small immovable, unresizable dialog.. which would have been terrible.. but I later found that if you find the right place to click - it is resizable and movable.. and it remembers the layout. Whew!
The search is a good addition.. as scrolling through all of the big component previews is not useful.
At first, the drop down navigator wasn’t refreshing properly with the previews.. but it seemed to go away after a while.. maybe a refresh or loading issue.

In the meantime I can use the shortcut key Y - to pop up the big dialog and coverup my work.. but not sure how it compares to the compact menu list of hundreds of components we used to rely on - from the toolbar icon.

Also the text styles dropdown in the inspector is better - now that the color variable selector shows the custom product color palette that we have defined. So if you use Custom text styles and need to change the color for some text that has a style applied - the button picker at least shows the right palette. Before neither the picker dropdown or swatch remembered which color palette you were using.
The one downside - before, it showed actual samples of the text styles.
Now, they all look the same.. so I have to scan very closely down a list of font sizes and weights to make sure i pick the right one.
I think this is a case of just making things look neat and tidy and compact.. but it removed all the visual cues to quickly pick the thing you are after.. now it’s a slow and tedious process.

2

Hi there,

Thanks for sharing your feedback!

Indeed, the Command Bar replaced the Symbol toolbar button. I used that button a lot too, and I did miss it at first, but later on, I found the Command Bar to be much more useful.

Here’s a list of things I feel work much better with the Command Bar compared to the toolbar button:

  • The Y shortcut is faster than point+click the toolbar button
  • It remembers the last library or library group you inserted symbols from
  • Press ⌘F right after pressing Y to see all your enabled Libraries
  • There’s keyboard navigation for libraries and their groups in the Command Bar

Here’s a complete walkthrough of all the changes and improvements, I think it’ll be useful and by all means, please share any additional feedback you have.

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