Find unused layer and text styles

[Florin (Florin Radu)]

Hey there!

I have an issue with not being able to “clean” my sketch files at the end of a project, by finding and deleting unused layer styles and text styles.

Perhaps there are other ways to maintain a clean file, but while at the end of a project I focus on consistency and keeping the project style guide as clean as possible, during the “creative” phase I try and test as many color or text styles as needed, which leads to having 15 shades of gray while only 5-7 are actually used.

I used to rely on the Shared Style Finder plugin by Jason Burns (GitHub - sonburn/shared-style-finder: Find instances of a shared layer or text style.) to do so, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work any longer with the latest versions of Sketch.

I see on the official plugins page that there is an alternative called Sketch Manager by Jaer Pollux (https://www.sketchmanager.com/) but this only tells you if a style is used, and how many times. Also, it only finds styles used on an aboard and not those used on overrides, while the Shared Style Finder plugin allowed finding the instances of a layer or a text to check whether that style was actually used in a layout or was just a useless draft.

So, can I ask, is there any other way of finding if styles like Accent 3 (#9C0751) is actually used?

[Mads (Mads Lien)]

You can check out the Unused style remover plugin which works with the current version of Sketch, but only targets text styles and layers styles. Unfortunately no color variables, and I think it’s optimistic to hope anything will be added as it was last updated 4 years ago.

Also, the Automate plugin also has a few similar options which I just realized was a thing. Not sure how well it works, but the labels sound convincing.

I’ll also recommend the Merge duplicates plugin which I use daily for cleaning up my files. It’s $25 but you can try it for free to see if you find it useful. Lets you merge symbols, text styles, layer styles and color variables if you have duplicated and don’t want to manually re-assign everything.

[Florin (Florin Radu)]

Thank you for the advice, Mads.

I use Automate as well but for some reason, the Remove functions just don’t work. The Unused style remover plugin does the job and cleans the file, but I prefer locating and supervising each instance of a style that I delete.