New Mac beta: 2025.1 (Athens) available now

found a bug with duplicating symbols

Hi @dale This is expected now based on some requests we’ve had:

To create a copy of a Symbol source, you can use the Duplicate action in the menu bar/contextual menus, or copy and paste that Symbol source.

oh I see, just tried Figma and they do that. I think your way was better

this sucks for creating symbols in small amounts of space like between artboards, the amount of symbols I use is a lot and they are often between all the artboards, but this means we have no control over where the symbols are made and I can’t make a vertical stack of symbols if space is tight.

This is the joy of building software: one person’s must-have feature sucks to someone else :sweat_smile: Regardless, thanks for the candor!

We’ll keep reviewing the feedback from you and others as it comes in. We’re also continuing to work with this change internally and seeing how it feels (our initial impressions were good, sometimes that changes over time, sometimes it doesn’t).

We’re not above making changes if it turns out to be problematic for a lot of folks, especially during the beta.

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its essentially removing all control over where your symbols are made. cmd+d makes it go to the right, but if you have 6 desktop variants, and 6 mobile variant frames on the right, thats now 1600px x6 and 430px x 6 to the right of all the other symbols, so now that symbol drag feature that someone wanted to not press c and drag from the symbol window is now so far off the page that even they won’t be able to drag in from their symbol collection :sweat_smile:

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This is just another way to create an instance. It is not really ment to be used for large design systems, then you would use Symbols page where you can organize them better and use insert tool. This covers some other use cases where you want symbol on the same page with the instances. It also makes things easier when you are just testing your symbols behavior next to the symbol. I’m sure people have even more use cases.

However, it seems like there is no way anymore to create Symbols page when creating symbol? That should still be the option. You can create it yourself but it is a bit weird to not have an option to do it automatically. Or I’m missing something?

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There are some conditions when the Symbols page option doesn’t show when creating Symbols. We’re looking into this!

clears throat

feedback on changes to symbols with workflow video

This is also my workflow usually. While Creating instance from a symbol is a much needed addition, duplicating the symbol with option + drag is something I use everyday. We can’t lose the option to do that easily.

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A post was split to a new topic: Bug in scaling with k

I think having an option to option + drag the symbol should create instance and then maybe there should be a modifier like control + option + drag or something else to create copies of symbols.

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I think the other way around, we are all used to this workflow. Copy still copy. Instance, something like - control + option + drag

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Or option+shift - slightly better ergonomics

Thanks for the feedback folks, we’re reviewing and discussing internally and will let you know what we decide!

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Yeah, that makes sense too.

bug in making symbols from rectangles vs artboards.

If you make a symbol from a rectangle, it turns it into an instance and puts the symbol somewhere in your canvas that you have to track down. If you make it from an artboard, it works normally as expected.

Hi @dale,

This is the expected behavior:

  • Create a new symbol from a layer → the layer becomes an instance and the source goes somewhere else
  • Crate a new symbol from a Frame → the frame becomes the source

This is also how it works in Sketch 101 and earlier, with Artboards.

The placement of new symbol source frames you’re seeing is also the same way it works with artboards: the new Symbol Source frame will be placed after the last frame in that page.

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One small detail that would be nice is to have a placeholder for the team name and image during loading on the welcome screen. I always found it a bit clumsy to have nothing and then it appears and pushes everything down.