Saw a trick at Figma meetup that saved me 2 hours on icon sets

I went to a local Figma meetup in Austin last Thursday and one of the senior designers showed us how to batch rename layers using regex find and replace. I had been manually clicking through 50+ icons renaming each one for weeks. She did the whole set in about 30 seconds. Has anyone else found a way to speed up repetitive layer tasks in Figma? I'm still pretty new to regex stuff.

2 comments

2 Comments

joel2802d ago

oh hey, the regex thing is actually super useful but the way you're describing it is a little off. batch rename with regex is great for icons but you gotta be careful with the pattern you write. i mean, one wrong character and you could rename half your layers to garbage. maybe it's just me but i usually test my regex on one or two layers first before running it on the whole set. also, pro tip: you can use the "find and replace" plugin too if regex feels too technical. it lets you do wildcards and stuff without writing full patterns.

logan_schmidt1d ago

yeah, "one wrong character and you could rename half your layers to garbage" is basically the story of my life with regex... i've definitely been burned by that before. it's funny how one little typo can cascade into a total mess, especially when you're working with a big group of icons that all start with similar names. do you usually test on a copy of the file, or just manually check the first few layers? i feel like even testing on a couple layers can miss some edge cases if your naming scheme has weird quirks...