A radial menu for Figma on Mac: faster than keyboard shortcuts

Figma has something like forty keyboard shortcuts that actually matter. V, T, F, R, K, Cmd+D, Cmd+Alt+K, Shift+A, Shift+O, and on and on. Even experienced designers tend to plateau at six or seven. The rest live in the top menus, or in the command palette, or in a tab somewhere with "figma shortcut cheat sheet" in its title.

This is a muscle-memory problem, not a design problem. Figma's shortcuts are fine in isolation. You just can't reasonably keep forty of them in working memory at the same time. You remember the two you used this morning and forget the one from last Tuesday, even though it would have saved you a click right now.

A radial menu is a good fit for exactly this middle tier. Not the shortcuts you know cold, and not the obscure ones you'd have to look up anyway. The ten to fifteen in the middle — the ones you'd absolutely use if pressing them didn't require remembering the modifier combo.

What Figma's command palette already solves

Figma added a command palette at Cmd+/ a few years ago and it's genuinely useful. If you can name the thing, you can type a few letters and run it. "Auto layout." "Flatten." "Export as PNG." All there, all searchable.

The command palette wins for actions you can name. It loses for actions you do constantly. Typing au enter to wrap something in auto layout is fine the first time and tedious the fiftieth. A radial menu wins for the things your hand already knows it wants to do — it's just that your brain doesn't want to spell them out.

Think of it as a two-layer system. Cmd+/ for recall. A radial menu for reflex.

A Figma-specific profile

Here's a layout that works well for production design work — the set of things you do twenty times an hour but never quite memorized the shortcut for:

Eight wedges, two sub-menus, sixteen-ish total actions all reachable from a single hold-and-flick. Some of these are things where you already know the shortcut (F, T, P). That's fine — the menu is still useful even when you know the keystroke, because the activation pattern is consistent. Your brain doesn't have to context-switch between "which mental bucket is this shortcut in."

Making it app-aware

The above profile is only useful when you're actually in Figma. Opening the same menu while Mail is frontmost would be confusing.

This is where context-aware profiles matter. Swik lets you attach a profile to a frontmost-app condition. When Figma is the frontmost app, the design profile above is active. When you switch to Slack, the menu switches back to your general profile without you doing anything. You can chain it further: one profile for Figma editing, another for Figma Dev Mode, another for FigJam. Same trigger, different wedges, based on what's in front of you.

Context profiles work for more than just apps. You can attach them to the current Wi-Fi network (office vs home) or to specific external displays (the studio monitor vs the laptop). A common setup is: Figma + studio display = full design profile with export and component actions. Figma + laptop screen = stripped-down profile with just the most common tools, because you're probably reviewing a design in a coffee shop, not producing one.

FigJam and Dev Mode

FigJam has its own smaller set of useful actions: sticky note, shape, connector, stamp, vote. Dev Mode has another set: copy as code, inspect spacing, download assets. Both benefit from the same treatment. One wedge layout per mode, auto-switched by context.

A particular win in Dev Mode: the "copy CSS" / "copy as SwiftUI" / "copy as Compose" actions are buried in a dropdown. Putting them on three wedges of a Dev Mode profile means one flick gets you from "selected a frame" to "code on clipboard." Developers who split their day between Figma and a code editor will feel this immediately.

A few things to know

Figma's menu actions use its own keyboard layer. The radial menu triggers actions by sending keystrokes to Figma, so the shortcuts you map are the same shortcuts Figma itself uses. If Figma changes a shortcut in an update, you'll want to update the corresponding wedge. This doesn't happen often, but it happens.

Modifiers matter. Some Figma shortcuts require the canvas to be focused, not the layers panel. If a wedge seems to fire but nothing visible happens, click once on the canvas first. This is a Figma behavior, not a menu behavior.

The menu isn't a replacement for plugins. If you're already deep into a plugin-heavy workflow with Design Lint, Content Reel, or Iconify, the radial menu sits alongside them. It's best for built-in Figma actions — the plugins stay where they are.

It works in the desktop app, not the web. Because a radial menu operates at the macOS level, it needs the Figma desktop app to be frontmost. Figma in a browser tab is just a browser tab to the OS, and your Figma profile won't auto-activate. Easiest fix: use the desktop app for production work and the browser for quick views.