Add “Connect All” action to Shared Libraries

Help us improve Penpot Feature requests
1

When a Penpot file has many available Shared Libraries, each library currently has to be connected individually using the + action in the Libraries modal.

This becomes repetitive when working with larger design systems split across many library files, especially after importing .penpot files from external design systems.

Proposed enhancement

Add a bulk action in the Shared Libraries section to connect all currently available libraries at once.

The existing per-library + action would remain unchanged.

Example:

Connect All

UX questions

I’d like guidance from the Penpot team on:

  • whether the action should be called Connect All or Add All
  • whether an active search/filter should affect all available libraries or only the visible filtered set
  • how partial failures should be handled

Contribution

I’m interested in implementing this enhancement myself as a community contribution if the approach fits Penpot’s UX and product direction.

If approved, could a maintainer create or link the corresponding GitHub issue for tracking?

image
image3020×1646 346 KB

Image: Screenshot of the Add to Library screen for reference.

2

This is a really interesting idea for a contribution!

Though I do have a workaround for anyone who finds themselves wanting to connect the same libraries to a file every time: create a Default libraries file.

  1. Create a new file called Default libraries (or whatever you want)
  2. Connect all your regularly-used libraries to this file
  3. Publish this file as a library
  4. Every time you create a new file, you just need to connect the Default libraries file, and you’ll get access to all the libraries connected to that file.

The benefit of this is that you could also create different collections of libraries for different contexts, rather than an all or one-by-one approach.