Speed up your workflow with Sketch Runner

Published in

Sketch Tricks

4 min readJan 23, 2019

What is Sketch Runner?

Runner helps you to get around Sketch quicker by giving you an intuitive interface to supercharge your daily workflow. Stop searching through your menu & start running commands directly from your keyboard.

You can refer to Runner as your extremely powerful spotlight search for your Sketch. Whether you’re building a design system, cleaning up a messy sketch file or simply looking for ways how to speed up your workflow — this plugin might be a perfect fit.

When and why should you use Sketch Runner?

If you’re working with a prominent symbol library

Working with an extensive symbol library could be tedious at times. Luckily for you, Runner gives you the ability to preview the symbols you’re looking for. Take this example — you’re working with the Material Design base kit, and you’re looking for a specific one line row — how convenient would it be if you could just write down “one line row” and get all the one line components you currently have as symbols. Well, you can:

Runner gives you a preview of the symbols you’re scrolling through

If you’re a keyboard ninja

If you’re like me and you mainly work with your keyboard, then this is the plugin for you. Probably half of my workflow goes through Runner, from going to or importing symbols to creating and applying styles around design files, with a bit of practice Runner can take you to new heights regarding work speed.

How do you use Sketch Runner

Sketch Runner is a pretty straight forward plugin, even though it’s the plugin of all plugins. Here we’ll go through its essential functions.

run — Run allows you to run a menu item or a plugin. In this menu is where you can excel as a user, especially if you use a lot of plugins more on this topic in the section below.

goto — Go to is pretty self-explanatory, yet extremely useful, especially if working in a big design file.

insert — Your bread and butter if you’re working with a design system. Insert allows you to interact with your symbol library allowing you to preview the symbol before you import it — just like the Spotlight search on MacOS

create — A quick way to create both symbols and styles.

Creating & inserting the newly created symbols

apply — Great way to apply the styles you’ve previously created. The positive thing is that they’re already saved, so you’re just a key away from applying them

install — Why bother going outside of Sketch to go to Github when you have almost every Sketch plugin one click away from being installed? In the example

Installing and quicky de-installing with ⌘ + delete combination

Awesome plugin combinations with Sketch Runner

Sketch Runner + Stark

There is no better plugin for contrast accessibility testing than Stark. This plugin’s main idea is to check two colours against WCAG 2.0 standards, to make sure that your designs are accessible and easy to view all users. On top of that Stark could simulate Colorblindness. Through Runner, you could just “run” the Stark’s “Protanopia” command, and you’ll get a generated preview of how your artboard looks to people with such vision deficiency.

Sketch Runner + Automate

Automate is one of the most powerful Sketch plugins. It gives you control over almost every imaginable aspect of Sketch — from arrangement to layer, symbol, library, artboard, text, style options and more; you can do almost everything. In the current example, you’re able to see one of the standard patterns that prove just how powerful Automate & Runner are together. We wouldn’t go too in-depth on how Automate works, in order to leave the exploration process to you.