We spend a lot of hours in Figma – enough that shaving a few seconds off a repeated action genuinely adds up. Over time, our team has accumulated a quiet arsenal of shortcuts that just live in muscle memory now. Some of these you probably know. A couple might actually change your day. Here are the eight we'd miss most if they disappeared.
1. Cmd + Option + C / Cmd + Option + V
Copy & paste properties
This one is criminally underused. Instead of hunting through the right panel to manually match fills, strokes, and effects between layers, you copy the properties from one element and paste them directly onto another. It's the style transfer shortcut we wish we'd learned on day one.
2. Hold Option + hover between elements
Measure spacing on the fly
Hold Option, hover near another element, and Figma shows you the exact pixel distance between the two. No more guessing whether that gap is 16px or 18px, no more zooming in to squint at the canvas. It just tells you. The moment this one clicked for us, we couldn't unsee how often we'd been eyeballing things that didn't need to be eyeballed.
3. Hold Cmd + click
Select through layers
Deep nesting is a fact of life in complex files. Holding Cmd while clicking lets you punch through frames and groups to grab the exact element you want – no double-clicking your way down five levels. Once you start using it, clicking through layers without it starts to feel genuinely painful.
4. Option + L
Collapse all layers
When your layers panel looks like someone knocked over a filing cabinet, Option + L brings the whole thing back to ground level. Select something first and it collapses everything except that element's branch. Select nothing and it flattens the whole panel. It's a small thing that makes a big difference to how calm a working session feels.
5. Shift + Arrows
Nudge by 10px
Arrow keys move things by 1px. Shift + Arrow moves them by 10. That's it – that's the shortcut. And yet somehow it speeds up layout work noticeably, especially when you're working with 8px grid systems and you just need to hop an element two grid units over. Your wrist will thank you.
6. Option + drag
Duplicate in place
Hold Option and drag any element to instantly clone it. The original stays put, the copy follows your cursor. It sounds obvious until you realize how many times a day you've been doing Cmd + D and then manually repositioning. Option + drag is faster, more intuitive, and it keeps your hands on the canvas where they belong.
7. [Cmd + ] / Cmd +
Move a layer easily
Nudging something up or down in the layer stack without touching the layers panel. Right bracket brings a layer forward, left bracket sends it back. You can hold Cmd + Option + ] or [ to jump it all the way to the top or bottom in one move. We use this constantly when elements are stacking unexpectedly and we don't want to break our flow by reaching for the panel.
8. R / O / T / L / P / F
Your tool shortcut alphabet
Rectangle. Oval. Text. Line. Pen. Frame. Six letters that cover most of what you're building with. Hit the key, draw the thing, press V to go back to the pointer – no toolbar hunting required. If you're still clicking up to the toolbar to switch tools, this is the shortcut set that will feel most immediately life-changing. Give it a week and it'll be automatic.
