We’re big fans of Sketch. We use it for everything from low-fidelity wireframes to pixel-perfect mockups.

However, many of us who cut our teeth in Illustrator find that while Sketch rocks 99% of the time, there are still a few workflows that, well, need work.

Specifically: it’s a pain to unlock layers. Illustrator has a handy keyboard shortcut but Sketch doesn’t. And it seems to be a common ask amongst the community.

So we made a plugin to do just that. To install it, simply download the zip and double-click the “.sketchplugin” files. Keep reading to learn more.

The problem

You’re in the flow, navigating your artboard when you decide to shift a few items around. You drag-select them only to find that some things are locked:

So now you need to find the locked layers. You look for the little lock in the layers palette but you’re not sure which is which, because you didn’t name your layers… (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Instead you try a group-select to toggle the locks, but that toggles unlocked layers too. Boo. You have to select each one individually, without the pesky scrollbar getting in the way:

Our solution

We wrote a simple plugin to unlock all layers on the current artboard with a keyboard shortcut. To install it, simply download the zip and double-click the “.sketchplugin” files. Check out our code on GitHub.

Here’s a screen capture of the plugin in action:

You can access the plugin via the plugins menu or keyboard shortcut: ⌘⌥L (Command + Option + L). You’ll know its worked when you see the notification at the bottom of the screen.

It’s worth mentioning that adding keyboard shortcuts to your plugins is incredibly easy via method a or method b.