Do you want help us improve Penpot?

Penpot hub.

The current hub makes a good overview of which templates are available. But I have to install it to figure out what it is.

I’m missing a page for each template that presents the template, some facts etc. Image, and maybe even a score/review/comment

Thank you for sharing your feedback on the Penpot Hub, Jesper! We completely agree – having individual pages for each template, with images, details, and even reviews, would enhance the experience significantly.

We’ve rolled out these individual pages today. For future templates, we’ll work with contributors to provide detailed information, so each page offers the insights you’re looking for. Unfortunately, we may not be able to add detailed information for past templates, as we don’t have all the required data.

Moving forward we’ll bring other enhanced features to our Penpot hub such as reviews and more info on the contributors and their templates.

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@carolina.portugal @Paula Suggestion for the forum: make it possible to create new optional forum tags

Is it possible to implement the following in Penpot?
By default in CAD programmes you can see the XY position of the cursor, this would also be useful within Penpot. This would make it easier to design.

Funny enough, Penpot used to have this feature, but it was removed since the info felt redundant with the rulers and added visual noise. That said, it could totally work as a plugin, but the cursor’s position would be displayed in the plugin panel.

Is it possible to reimplemt it but do the same like the grid (gave the user the choise to use it or not) and show the coordinates somewhere at the bottom off the page?

@carolina.portugal in Home assistant on the forum you have the possibility to vote on an feature request in the forum see Home Assistant Forum Feature request example off an topic to vote on youtube music media browser is it possible to impliment this also on this forum?

Is it possible to add a search box to the plugins page?

I am considering creating a plugin and I didn’t see a search box to find specific plugins. I’m not sure if the plugin I’d like to create already exists or not.

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@venomDev thanks for your feedback, we are working it.

Hello everyone,

First of all, thank you for all your effort in creating such a great tool. I believe you are the “Blender” of UI design and you’re doing excellent work.

I recently started using Penpot for a side project with some friends. We initially started with Figma since it’s my main tool and I love it: everything is fluid and fast, everything is placed where I expect to find it. But we soon realized that didn’t make much sense. Personally, I don’t mind paying €15/month for a tool that I believe is really good. However, making my developer colleagues pay just to consume my work seems to indicate Figma’s true interests. Additionally, I’ve found some features in Penpot that have surprised me: the grid layout is excellent and (this might seem trivial) being able to add margins to elements in a container without needing to create another autolayout is very satisfying.

I definitely don’t expect Penpot to be a copy of Figma, but I’ve encountered some things that, perhaps due to my current way of working, cause me frustration. I’ll try to be concise while providing enough information to understand the use case:

Color palette and text styles

Having spent several years working on design systems, my approach to designing interfaces is very system-oriented. I usually use many colors (tokens), including colors with the same HEX but different names because they serve different purposes. The same applies to text styles, with different sizes (body-md, body-sm, etc.) for different devices. This means that when looking for a color or text style, I care more about its name than its value. In this case, the color palette becomes very small (the lateral scroll fills up quickly) and there’s no way to search by name. The color picker shows circles with very similar colors, and I have to hover over them and wait for their names to appear. I recently noticed that all colors appear in the resources tab of the left sidebar, but honestly, I don’t want to use the same menu where layers and pages are located. Idea: A simple dropdown for all colors where typing the name filters the results list.

Component variants and properties

Probably the first thing I missed was certain component creation functionalities. Don’t get me wrong, the current functionality is already sufficient for creating many interfaces, but I feel everything is slower and honestly, it makes me reluctant to create many components. Currently, component creation is very similar to how it was done in Sketch years ago, creating entire matrices of “disconnected” components separated by slashes (/). The main problem with this is that many properties are siblings or independent, and creating a (/) is actually nesting. Building complex components like buttons with variations such as size, type, hierarchy, or style is quite tedious today.

Sharing a design

There’s a small functionality that I took for granted would be similar in Penpot: the share button. I’m so used to sharing links that open a specific frame that when I saw it wasn’t there, I really missed it. It’s very natural to have files with many screens, and without this functionality, anyone accessing the file enters an ocean of screens that’s difficult to navigate.

Other small details
  1. All pages have the same paper sheet icon. I don’t know if other page types exist, but if not, the icon is redundant. Additionally, many designers end up placing their own emoji to better find pages, creating an icon redundancy (the page icon + the user-chosen one).
  2. Trackpad zooming on Mac is very slow. I have to zoom at least 3 times to get where I want.
  3. A keyboard shortcut to open the resource finder. If it exists, I haven’t found it. This shortcut would probably be the one I use most in Figma. If I need anything, I simply use the shortcut and type. I don’t want to search for it in a panel.
  4. I’ve never worked using rulers. I had to learn the ruler shortcut just to hide them repeatedly every time I reload the page.
  5. Files can be opened in a new tab, but you can’t return to the Penpot panel in a new tab. It might seem trivial, but consider this use case:
  • I access the Penpot panel
  • I open a design file
  • I realize I need to change something in the component library. I don’t want to leave this file to access the library. My natural instinct was to press Command and click on the Penpot icon to open it in a new tab, but it doesn’t work.
  • I know I can open a new tab and type the design.penpo… URL, but it seems like a longer path.

Again, thank you in advance for all your work.
Have a lovely day!

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