Hey folks. I’d like to hear your thoughts and feedback on the components mode – specifically the inspector.
I’d be interested in hearing about how you use it, whether you edit components through this way or are missing any specific features or functionality.
Also please let me know the context of your suggestions - if you’re currently managing components solo, or part of a larger team or library!
Thanks in advance!
Hello there! So glad this mode is getting your focus! Top of mind on our end (team of 5 designers and 20+ devs, all using the same design system library and hoping to migrate fully away from Zeplin):
Would absolutely LOVE basic stats on how often the component (either symbol, color, text-style, etc) is used. This would help a lot to keep our library organized and clean.
Even better would be a list of WHERE the component is used (name of page + frame and then you can click it and it brings you there - the main feature that keeps me from deleting the Automate plugin).
This is such a great view to organize your stuff, and yet you’re missing a lot of the batch renaming features you have in the Canvas View.
Would love for the inspector to have a “Ready for dev” checkbox. The Components View is the simplest way to display content for dev handoff, but at the moment it’s parachuting devs into our entire design system rather than a subset of only what’s relevant to them.
A “Share URL” button to quickly share individual symbols.
And then some stuff about the Components View but not the inspector specifically! 
Would love to be able to open that mode as a new window rather than taking over the whole window. Clear sign of this need is very often I will accidentally close the window to exit that mode rather than switching back to the Canvas view.
Generally speaking the grid view of the Components View is too large and doesn’t display enough content, it would be great to be able to tweak the grid size like you can in Finder, Photos, etc.
You can’t drag and drop items from one group to the other through the grid view; you have to do it from the left panel instead.
I agree about the ability to detach the window and also more drag and drop options to organize components.
At some point I was thinking that Symbols page should be a part of components view, like a different view. In that view you would also have automatic ways to organize components on the canvas. This would probably work similar to Symbol Organizer plugin but with more options to create organized sections on canvas showing different groups of components and their variants. This seems to be a view that most people prefer due to being able to see what is available in the design system without going through different menus etc. You could, of course, copy components from there to the main canvas.
So many amazing ideas here and I think I agree with all of them!
I think the component view is a great place to manage overrides on symbols, as you can isolate a series of nested symbols - some new, faster workflow for overrides or at least being able to manage them with the amount of screen real estate available would be great.
A little off topic maybe, but I’ve been playing with framer lately and I LOVE the view they have for managing variants and the general workflow. I know Sketch doesn’t have variants per se, but I think the place to do this, if you were, would be here. The framer approach is way nicer than the nested frame approach from Figma.
You have a dedicated workspace already, it’d be crazy not to leverage it more.
I have a few thoughts that come to my mind. For context - I’m a single designer, usually working with one developer.
It’d be nice to be able to order components (symbols, colors) manually. I’d for example like to order colors from the lightest to the darkest, but not necessarily name them like gray-100, gray-200 to achieve that. It’d be also nice to be able to order categories of components manually. Currently, they’re ordered alphabetically I believe.
I’d like to be able to hide some symbols from the component view. I might have some supporting / helper symbols (like cursors, scrollbars, …) I don’t necessarily want to be included for the developer to see.
Not super related to the inspector requirement, but it’d be also nice to have the ability to attach more information to components, like description (rich text ideally for documenting), link etc… so a developer may have more context.