Modes don’t trigger for collections reached through variable aliases #770

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1. ncorbohudak-png

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   nathanacurtis

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6. nathanacurtis commented on Oct 16, 2026

   

   nathanacurtis

   on Oct 16, 2026

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   @ncorbohudak-png Thanks for submitting! Yes, this is a gap in the plugin output, and I've grappled with this before. As in, before AI, when the complicatedness inhibited my capacity to solve it. It's worth another look now.

   I'll take at least an analysis look at this next week.
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9. nathanacurtis commented on Oct 16, 2026

   

   nathanacurtis

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   Analysis complete; the report is confirmed and planned for a fix. The Modes generator records only each bound variable's own collection and never inspects the variable's valuesByMode, so an alias into a multi-mode collection is invisible to detection.

   Planned fix (plugin-side only):

   • Alias traversal. From every variable the component references, follow VARIABLE_ALIAS values across all modes, breadth-first, with visited sets so no variable or collection is evaluated twice. Every reachable collection with 2+ modes joins the Modes section; the existing filter, ordering, and per-mode exhibits are unchanged, so directly bound collections behave exactly as before.
   • Variant-aware exhibits. Exhibits currently always render the default variant. The fix tracks which variants reference each detected collection's variables and renders a variant that actually uses one — the default variant when it qualifies, otherwise the simplest variant that does — so each mode exhibit visibly changes.
   • Tests. The traversal and variant selection are pure, unit-tested functions; mode behavior is verified in Figma with a single-mode semantic collection aliasing a multi-mode collection, including the case where only a non-default variant carries the alias.

   Performance expectation: traversal adds one variable lookup per unique variable in the alias graph (memoized), which should be negligible; any noticeable slowdown would come from the additional exhibits the newly detected collections legitimately add.

   The full implementation plan is saved internally.
10. nathanacurtis

    moved this from Ready to In progress in Specson Oct 16, 2026