Figma keyboard shortcuts for Mac

Figma's tools are single letters, which is what makes the app fast and also what makes it feel unpredictable to a newcomer: press R while a text layer is being edited and you type an R. Every shortcut in this section assumes the canvas has focus and nothing is in text-edit mode.

Holding Space is the one to build a habit around. It temporarily switches to the Hand tool for as long as you hold it and hands the previous tool back the moment you let go, so panning never costs you the tool you were using.

Deep selection is the thing that separates fluent Figma from frustrated Figma. Clicking selects the outermost frame; holding ⌘ while you click reaches straight through to the layer under the pointer, however deeply it is nested, and holding ⌘ while you drag a marquee does the same for a group of them.

⌥⌘A is the quiet workhorse of a design system change: it selects every layer matching the one you have, so a padding value or a colour can be corrected across a page in one edit rather than forty.

Groups and frames look similar on the canvas and behave nothing alike, so it is worth having both chords in your fingers. ⌘G groups; ⌥⌘G wraps the same selection in a frame, which is what you want whenever the result needs constraints, clipping or auto layout later.

The four boolean operations all live on ⌥⇧ plus a mnemonic letter — union, subtract, intersect, exclude — and they stay editable afterwards. ⌥⇧F flattens the result into a single vector path when you are certain, and ⌥⌘O turns a stroke into an outlined shape.

Auto layout has the densest shortcut set in Figma because so much of it is modifier-plus-drag rather than a chord. ⇧A adds it to a selection, ⌥⇧A strips it off, and ⌃⇧A asks Figma to suggest a structure for a selection that was never built as a stack.

The alignment keys only apply while an auto layout frame is selected, and they are positional rather than mnemonic: the arrow keys set the alignment within the frame, while W, A, S and D push it to an edge. X toggles the space-between behaviour, which is the fastest way to build a nav bar.

⌘/ opens the quick actions bar, and it is the honest answer to this entire page: type the name of the thing you want and Figma will run it and show you its shortcut on the way past. ⌘K opens the actions menu the same way from anywhere in the app.

⌃⌥⌘K is the one that saves the most time on a mature file. From any instance it jumps to the main component, which is the difference between fixing a button once and hunting the page it was defined on.

Figma's type shortcuts are almost all increment-and-decrement pairs built on < and >, which means one hand can walk a font size, a weight, a letter-spacing value and a line height without leaving the canvas. They apply to the selected text layer, or to the selected characters inside one.

The zoom chords do not use ⌘ at all, which surprises people arriving from every other Mac app: it is ⇧+ and ⇧-, with ⇧1 to fit everything on the page and ⇧2 to fill the viewport with whatever is selected. ⌘+ and ⌘- work as well, so either habit is fine.

⌘\ hides the whole interface for a screenshot or a presentation, and ⇧⌘\ collapses the panels while keeping the canvas where it is. Both are toggles, so the same chord brings the interface back.

Design review is the worst case for invisible shortcuts. You press ⌥⌘K and a component exists; you press ⌘/ and a menu appears and disappears again before anyone reads it. Whoever is watching the call sees a file changing shape and has no way to learn how, which is the entire reason design walkthroughs get recorded and then rewatched at half speed.

Show KeyPress is a paid macOS menu bar app, for macOS 14 Sonoma or later, that draws each key you press as a keycap on top of everything else on screen. There is no Figma plugin, no integration and no video recording — it is an overlay window, so a whole-screen share or a display capture carries it automatically while a single-window share can leave it out.