To follow up from yesterday’s post, in Figma, object selection actually goes onto the undo stack. This is because in a professional tool with objects in multiple levels of hierarchy, it might take a while to construct a selection to work on – and since selection is always just one accidental click away from being completely cleared, undoable selection is extra protection.

However, at the same time renaming a file – or changing settings like file access – is not undoable. This is in part because we didn’t feel people would understand they could cancel out their rename this way (Safari too used to have “reopen last tab” under ⌘Z, until it reverted to Chrome’s ⌘⇧T), but mostly because you could accidentally undo through a file rename during regular work if you were not careful, without noticing, and that felt like it’d have more profound consequences.

In some ways, it helped me to think of these not as “ineligible for undo” but rather “living outside of time.” The moment a file is renamed, it will always have been named that way. (For the purposes of undo, at least. You can acknowledge anything you want on the version history screen.)

I’m not saying these are universally correct choices – as a matter of fact, some users find undoable selection (at least initially) pretty confusing! – but mostly sharing these as examples of intentional thinking about what deserves undo, and what should be exempt from it and taken care of elsewhere.