Hi everyone, in this video we'll look at the difference between plugins... kind of traditional Figma plugins... and these new fancy, newish fancy, widgets, why do we have two of them? I'll show you the difference, and I will show you a couple of my favorites... oh, look at this one... automatic color styling, nice.

All right, the general broad differences is that plugins do more... widgets are quite simple creatures... plugins tend to do loads and loads of things, potentially... the other thing is that you can only have one plug-in open at a moment... and widgets, you can have lots open at one time because they're lightweight. Plugins generally appear in, like this little icon one, icon Scout...

appears in its own little window and produces stuff for your canvas... and then when you're finished with it you close it... whereas widgets live on your canvas... and you can have loads of them open. So let's open up this one here, all this one does, well... sometimes they end up in strange places...

so mine's ended up tied into this, and it is stuck in there... this brings up a good point, widgets are new... and they are developed by lots of different people... all with different abilities... and some of them are updated all the time to keep up, and some of them aren't... so I'm going to share a couple here, but sometimes they just don't work...

this one does normally, but very often... I end up getting them smushed in here and I can't actually find them... 'Option' click the little thing, there he is... he's hidden in there so if I hold 'Option' on a Mac, 'Alt' on a PC... and click the little chevron, it spills down everything, there you are... so I can say actually, just come out of there and...

come over here for me. Sometimes with plugins and widgets... you have to close down Figma and open it back up before they work properly... not all the time, but I've run into that problem a lot. So this one here just allows you to pick a date... the date, you've done something, it works for FigJam as well as Figma...

and it is cool, it's on an angle, you can pick different angles... can pick different dates... it might be your date to be completed, the date it was finished... the day you're going to deliver it... but the cool thing about it is, it gets a sweet little icon there... it's my little widget...

but I can have more than one, 'Shift I' to open up the resources... and there it is there, we're going to use this one in the next video... Color Levels Generator, it's awesome... and it lives on the canvas... and while plugins generally produce something that's kind of dead... on the canvas it's just produced and it's finished...

these are dynamic, I can change the date and it adjusts... and this one here, I can change the colors, and it adjusts... it's dynamic, it's doing something, lightweight, but it's doing something... I can save these styles to my Style library, it's all very cool. So that's why we have plugins and widgets I wish they'd just smush them together... because I feel like the terms do the same thing, but now we all know...

you can have multiple widgets on the canvas at once... plugins, just one open at a time... but generally they can do more, more processing power... widgets, lightweight, simple things... and lastly, before we go, shortcut... who remembers, to open the last plug-in that you used?

If you haven't already, you will find a plug-in that you know and love... and you use all the time... this will become a handy shortcut, I promise... that's right, it is 'Command Option P' on a Mac, 'Ctrl Alt P' on PC... there you go, there's no such one for the plug-in... oh, one last thing about plugins, you can actually copy and paste them...

so you've got two of them... I've got two of the same plug-in now, I need two of these... do I need two of them? Not really, probably need loads of these ones though... all right, there you go, plugins versus widgets, in Figma.