Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

Infinite canvases like Figma give me infinite anxiety. There's no way to easily and sensibly hyperlink to specific areas/contexts within the canvas, and it's really difficult to find things unless you know exactly where to look.

It's like the manifestation of a cluttered desk of papers in the digital world - exactly what we tried to avoid when building new digital interfaces for so many decades.

Edit: there is a way to hyperlink directly to sections in Figma (see comments below), but I've never been a recipient of them :lol:

View on HN

> There's no way to easily and sensibly hyperlink to specific areas/contexts within the canvas

There are absolutely ways to hyperlink to specific areas and contexts within the canvas. It's one of the core features that's always been part of Figma. For example, click on anything on the canvas and you'll observe the URL change. You can share that URL

That does indeed work! Fascinating.

Now I'm endlessly curious as to why I've never gotten a correctly located link from many designers in several orgs. It is, however, sufficiently buried that I think most designers just copy the browser URL and call it a day.

I honestly can't remember a single time I've gotten a targeted Figma link like this from a designer.

Because people will delete and create new modes as they iterate so those hash links become stale. So while the person who replied to you is technically correct, effectively it is still very unstable.

Similarly, on pages like GitLab you can link to specific line(s) of code in a file...but it often is the head of that branch. The URL will resolve in the future, but its pretty common that the chunk of code has moved.

I wish it was easy to grab a URL for that specific version, with a banner at the top saying it's not the newest version of the code (something I sometimes see with documentation). I don't see why Figma couldn't do this, too.

> Similarly, on pages like GitLab you can link to specific line(s) of code in a file...but it often is the head of that branch. The URL will resolve in the future, but its pretty common that the chunk of code has moved.

On GitHub you can hit the 'y' key[1] and it will add the revision into the URL.

GitLab will most probably have something similar.

[1]=https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/accessibility/keyboar...

Thanks! It looks like they use the same shortcut key!

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/shortcuts.html#project-files

To be fair, you didn't figure it out either so one could consider this a feature discoverability issue.

I didn't know either, but plan to share with my coworkers!

> For example, click on anything on the canvas and you'll observe the URL change.

I think this might be the problem. The URL doesn't change as you move around, so folks just copy the URL at the point in time of whatever they're staring at, and end up sharing whatever area was previously focused / clicked on,

The feature is pretty easy to use- at what point do we just accept that some people shouldn't be using the tool? If we always design for the least capable user, we will be unnecessarily handcuffing ourselves.

You can link to sections. The hard part is searching. How do you search for a visual artifact?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com