Figma React Hooks

A tiny collection of React hooks to make writing Figma plugins simpler ¹.

This tool is in currently in beta so please report any bugs or issues 🙏

Install

To install simply run

npm i figma-react-hooks

Usage

There are currently 2 hooks available in this library.

useOnMessage

useOnMessage provides the behaviour for window.onmessage which allows the Figma plugin UI to recieve data from the core plugin code.

Figma's onmessage documentation

The usage of this hook is somewhat similar to React's useEffect hook as it requires a function to be passed in as its first argument.

Using inline function

import { useOnMessage } from 'figma-react-hooks';

useOnMessage((data) => {
  // Do something here
  console.log(data);
});

Using a separate function

import { useOnMessage } from 'figma-react-hooks';

function anAwesomeFunction(data) {
  console.log(data);
}

useOnMessage((data) => anAwesomeFunction(data));

I will be adding the ability to pass nothing into useOnMessage and have it return the data as an object, rather than relying on passing in a function.

usePostMessage

usePostMessage(data: any, origin?: string)

This hook replicates the behaviour of postmessage which allows the plugin UI to send data back to the core plugin code.

Figma's postmessage documentation

It takes in an object and optionally, a string to set the origin.

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
data	`any`	`true`	This is the data you want to send back to the core plugin code. This can be almost any data type or plain object, as long as it's a serializable object. Read more about the restrictions here
origin	`string`	`false`	If you don't provide a specific origin, it will default to `'*'` which is what Figma recommends as a default. For more information on the origin property read Figma's API documentation.

Example

import { usePostMessage } from 'figma-react-hooks';

let data = { animal: 'dog', vibe: 'chill' };

function onSubmit(data) {
  usePostMessage(data);
}

To do

Add better error and exception handling to existing hooks
Add in hook for Figma's on function
Improve useOnMessage hook to allow more use cases