Feedback 2023.1 Beta 2 - Window's title bars look pretty bad

Thank you. Don't take it personally, I was talking about average over past few years and the fact light title bar issue was marked as "By Design" instead of at least "Postponed" that allows users to upvote.

 

Just as a note, this isn't universal behaviour. VisualStudio's secondary windows appear as separate windows as an example. So do Android Studio windows. It's frustrating to change behaviour that has been baked into people's workflows for 10+ years, but at the same time Unity appears to be more of an outlier on that one. Having it as an option would be better.

 

Just to let u know in case it matters to you, the project settings window/dialog, can add several hundred ms to every enter play mode action. (Not sure if related to domain reload, maybe it doesn't happen if u disable that, assuming you even can).
In my case it added ~500ms. Doesn't seem like much but it adds up.

 

Man this is depressing. Unreal 5 got a lovely UI upgrade, Unity getting uglier. Seems like whoever made this decision only uses macOS? Only explanation I think of because it looks ridiculous, laughably bad on PC with the mismatching themes.

 

By the way, the new Windows 11 file explorer shows how it's done right. It has normal controls, docking and multi-tab right in one single title bar. Would be great if Unity could adapt this tech when a user has Windows 11 installed.

 

This was working previously.. atleast made title bar not complete white...

Code (CSharp):

1. using System;
2. using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
3. using UnityEditor;
4.  
5. public class DarkMode
6. {
7.     enum GetAncestorFlags : uint
8.     {
9.         GA_PARENT = 1,
10.         GA_ROOT = 2,
11.         GA_ROOTOWNER = 3
12.     }
13.  
14.     const uint DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE = 20;
15.  
16.     [DllImport("user32.dll")]
17.     static extern IntPtr GetActiveWindow();
18.  
19.     [DllImport("user32.dll")]
20.     static extern IntPtr GetAncestor(IntPtr hwnd, GetAncestorFlags gaFlags);
21.  
22.     [DllImport("Dwmapi.dll", EntryPoint = "DwmSetWindowAttribute")]
23.     static extern int DwmSetWindowAttributeBOOL(IntPtr hwnd, uint dwAttribute, ref int pvAttribute, uint cbAttribute);
24.  
25.     // [DllImport("uxtheme.dll", EntryPoint = "#135", SetLastError = true, CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
26.     // private static extern int SetPreferredAppMode(int preferredAppMode);
27.  
28.     [InitializeOnLoadMethod]
29.     static void SwitchToDarkMode()
30.     {
31.         var mainWindow = GetAncestor(GetActiveWindow(), GetAncestorFlags.GA_ROOT);
32.  
33.         int trueBOOL = 1;
34.         DwmSetWindowAttributeBOOL(mainWindow, DWMWA_USE_IMMERSIVE_DARK_MODE, ref trueBOOL, 4);
35.         //SetPreferredAppMode(2);
36.     }
37. }
38.  

for all the things I hate about Apple.. at least UI's are consistent on there OS .. and they know how to do a DARK theme where everything on the OS adheres to it properly including the menu bar backgrounds being dark.. with some style of blur/gloss to it... unlike windows where even the stuff they own is left using legacy legacy UI's and the new UI stuff is bloated garbage.. a giant ugly mess of inconsistent UI's all in all.. and developers doing there own custom skins to make it not look rubbish.. this title bar stuff is just ugly though.

Just remake and build a custom menu bar system already! and while at it make sure all third party scripts/plugins that add custom menu's can also be found a single menu.. so tired of third party assets dumping menu's all over the place.

 

I'm on W10 and i definitely like this addition!
I want to thank the team behind this, this paves the way for better multi-monitor setup
(there still is a behaviour hiccup though that i talk about in this forum post)

I also understand why there's a "double title" as the unity tabs can be configured side-by-side, to have a tab layout inside the window, which is nice! (it allows to have fewer, more packed windows, e.g. one per-monitor and each having multiple side-by-side tabs)

It's true that the aspect is ugly, but at least we have this functionality atm.

 

Just noticed even this is in UE5, works for all windows that have single tab:

 

I think its kind of neat that I can use windows' snapping functions for unitys' windows now. I can see that being useful. What is annoying is that if you alt tab(or just click) a single window, it brings up everything. I feel this really defeats the purpose of there needing to be more than one alt tab icon. I realize certain programs handle this differently, and perhaps it is useful in some cases, Visual studio handles them as separate things, photoshop treats them as unity does(bringing all windows to the forefront when one is clicked).
Perhaps that could be a toggleable feature?

Anyway as for the title bars on inspectors - made a design criticism/mockup of maybe improving this or at least changing it a bit so it doesnt feel quite as repetitive. took all the cues from visual studio, because while similar, it looks quite a bit better at the moment.






also the main menubar/window is really ugly, I hope whatever you have planned to improve it, comes soon for that

 

I don't like this...

 

I know this is off topic, but the unity content dialog window also needs an UI update the current one is not only doesn't support dark mode but also will look out of date because in windows 11 the Microsoft will try to update all that old content dialog to follow the https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signature-experiences/design-principles. if they do not update it this will look very outdated soon when MSF done with their job.

I compare this with the macOS one because the macOS unity look more polished on UI compared to the windows unity. here how it should look when they followed new windows 11 design principle.
Current:


If followed the windows design principle:
White mode


Dark mode:


Currently the apple also followed this principle on their new apple music and tv app preview.


Good luck to all unity teams in the behind the scenes who work hard on all of this, looking forward for the improvement.

 

For me that's 10x times less priority.

 

Obviously, but I just tired every time I see the macOS unity they have good dark mode. while windows one, especially windows 11 its look very weird. The only way is update to the new winapp sdk but it seems like they already tried with the tittle bar but that's only work if you are using windows 11. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/desktop/modernize/apply-windows-themes
Windows 11 22h2:

and also, in that website the Microsoft also show only tittle bar dark mode support only.
Microsoft win32 tittle bar example:

the other ways are making a custom win32 color like Microsoft did back then to windows 10 file explorer but in the end, they need to scrap it back in windows 11 and choose to update it with winapp sdk.

currently the NanaZip (7zip fork) https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip successfully using this method. maybe unity team can try it.

 

Are you still listening?

I've been pretty intense earlier in this thread, but I really mean it. You're actively making Unity a lot worse by doing this. You can intend to make an improvement as much as you want, but you have spent time, effort and energy into making the core interaction with your product worse.

Alt+tabbing is just broken now. I'm testing the latest alpha because there's a neat feature, and I'm actively struggle to change OS windows. It's so horrible that if I'm to continue to use Unity, I'll have to teach myself never have a floating window ever, since otherwise two decades worth of muscle memory about how programs are supposed to work with regards to the taskbar, and alt+tab and all of that is wrong now.


There's a thing you've written earlier which is;

And, hey, no. If there's a discrepancy between how Unity works on MacOS and Windows, then chose the Windows way. You have like 95% of your users on Windows. If you're electing to F*** over the muscle memory of a part of your user base, F*** over the small Mac userbase, not the large Windows one.

MacOS' window handling is bad and wrong and ugly anyway!


In my 8 years of using Unity, there's been a lot of decisions that's left me confused or baffled or whatever. But this one is the first that makes me this angry. It's a direct attack on my day-to-day comfort, and it seems to be over something as silly as you wanting to simplify some code.

 

MacOS windows have the title centred in the window bar, and it looks fine,
it looks bad on windows because there they are directly on top of each other.

The problems with Alt-tab do not exist on mac unity.
There is even a black title bar matching the rest of unity.

I would not say mac is perfect but unity is looking better than windows here I would think so.

All this does not mean I don't agree with your point that you want the windows version to work and look good too. And I think in the end a custom window would be best like other apps have done. and before that is possible have an option in preferences for old / new behavior so everyone can choose what is best for them.

 

I also was sure this was a bug. If you want to go forward with this route, it *has* to be done better. Tabs & title bar have to be unified in functionality and theme. Epic is making Unity look like amateurs here, and as an avid Unity user I don't like that one bit!

 

Any chance you can add the option to have the windows not appear on the taskbar? My knowledge of Win32 is limited but you should be able to do it by just adding the WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW flag.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/winmsg/extended-window-styles

 

I use a custom Unity layout on Windows, as most devs using Unity professionally will be.
I can't usefully alt-tab in and out of Unity anymore. My task bar is loaded up with extra Unity windows now. This is a regression of basic functionality.

The ugly title bars are less important to me, they're ugly though.

 

Or even better: can we get a callback with window handle to allow us to customize it?

 

I've been working with 2023.2Alpha for few weeks now, on and off. I've been porting my old project to test the path tracing so I think I have had enough time with it.

Here is my opinion

1 - Alt tabbing between other apps (eg. Maya -> Substance -> Photoshop -> Unity) gets really annoying because now I have to alt tab tab tab and then if I miss it, then alt tab tab tab tab...I also realized that Windows tab order changes every time so this was really painful

2 - The worst part is when a window (eg .game view) is minimized. I usually turn on tabs with shortcuts (Ctrl + n), so I turn them off, on via short cuts. Nice and simple. The problem with new UI is that if a window is minimized, and I hit the short cut key, it doesn't do anything. So, then I have to look through the windows tabs to find the right one - or Alt Tab tab tab again...this broke my workflow quite a bit.

3 - I usually have multiple projects open, one, the actual project and others, a purpose driven utility type of project. I use it for creating LODs, testing assets, fracturing, adjusting textures or creating scriptable object database. Now, with multiple projects open, the tab window goes into a frenzy...and I find myself alt tabbing, then getting it wrong, alt tabbing again, then opening the window browser looking at the thumbnails...the title bar just says "Animator" or "Scene" and I can't figure out which is which, at least on the fly. Feels like I am playing a mini game that I keep losing

4 - Whenever I close a window, which was maximized, then open it again, it is not maximized...very annoying.

5 - The white bar makes me look at the screen twice. So, this is a bit personal, but I keep looking at the game view, then the white bar above and then the game view again...I tried hard to stop, but my eyes just keep glancing at it for a split second.

6 - I am not exactly sure why but sometimes, the HDRP wizard window, will just minimize itself whenever I click it. To stop this behavior I have close the underlying window (usually the game view) then click it again. Or alt tab towards it. Probably a bug that happens under some combination.

7 - I can't use the window bar to drag the window to merge and change layout. This seems a bit half baked. I can drag the window by dragging the white bar but cannot merge. I have to drag the default Unity Tab merge...so now we have 2 bars that each do different things...

So in conclusion

It looks really ugly, and distracting, but it is not a deal breaker. The current implementation is sort of a hit and miss both esthetics and function wise. If Unity gave me the choice, I don't think I would be using this as it just adds additional key presses and searching when I am switching apps and when working with multiple projects. I work with a triple monitor setup and it really is frustrating as the old window size and position is not maintained. Also the mounting tab icons on the task bar is annoying, it might be helpful if someone was just using one monitor, but when using multiple, it just makes life harder.

There is one good thing about this change though, in the default Unity, when I drag tabs, the dragging of the window (usually becomes a small icon of a window instead of actually dragging) has lots of lag. (I am running RTX4090 + 64gb RAM so the lag is not hardware related) But the new system is butter smooth - of course, I can't dock or merge it...so nice to look at, but sort of moot - hope the devs fix this regardless of the future direction.

Lastly, I wish Unity would allow Ctrl + n behavior to toggle tabs instead of just turning them on.

 

I find something like this. Look like in the past they already have some ui unity image in this web page https://blog.unity.com/technology/evolving-the-unity-editor-ux and it has dark mode tittlebar they put it in website but in reality its not there. Is this how unity tittlebar will estimated look like when things done or this is just a image for promotion purpose only? If so its already 4years ago yet the top bar still has white mode in the latest windows. I hope this will be a real things soon.
And this

 

Wow, these look amazing, even top level tabs like in Unreal.

Unfortunately looks like standard Unity marketing content...

 

It's called a mockup, UX/UI designers draw these and usually they are to communicate the goals to developers.

 

Ye and they did mockup and didn't implement it so it was mockup for marketing anyway.

 

Man that mockup looks so fantastic. Sadly it'd require a massive rework of probably all the EditorGUI and EditorGUILayout systems. Also the layout tabs at the top are just divine, I've dreamed of having that in Unity for years, even tried (and failed) making it myself.

Wish more work was going into achieving this. Unreal Engine has an entirely new engine with an all new clean modern UI. Unity basically just did a sorta half-baked UI update to make things look "flatter" but it didn't really aid the workflow all that much. This new menu bar change MIGHT be a sign they're moving in the right direction, but probably should have stayed in the dev branch until an actually new menu bar workflow was ready, rather than putting it into the betas

 

I just got around to trying out 2023, and wanted to add my thoughts as well. Just incase it might be useful and move the needle a bit.

I firstly want to say that I love that you can now minimize the floating windows! It is a great workflow improvement for me! Thank you for doing this!

Unfortunately, I have the same issues as a lot of people. But I will try to add helpful info, as to not just pile on.

• Screen space. The windows title bar is large, taking up about 35 pixels(?). It isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things, but it isn't nothing either. Especially when the majority of it is not being used.
• Distracting. The big white bar is also visually distracting in the dark theme. I normally have floating windows over the main editor window, so looks quite jarring to go from dark > light > dark on the screen. This is compounded by my previous point about its size. While I know you said that it supports OS theming in Windows 11. That doesn't really help me, and only helps somewhat. (Anyway, I prefer light theme windows)
• Visually confusing. It ends up looking like a Modal window, which is a bit confusing. This is a pretty week point, but still worth a quick mention.
• Feels low quality. To me, when I see it, it feels like it was a bug or a temporary hack. Not an intended feature. It makes it feel like it is a small open source project. And not a professional piece of software.
• Quality. We live in a day where 'most' of the software we use has custom title bars, both for the main window and for sub windows. As others have pointed out, we have Rider, Visual Studio, VS Code, Unreal Engine, Godot, Affinity Designer/Painter, etc. That all have custom title bars for both the main and floating windows. And that isn't even including all of the non dev software Obsidian, Outlook, Spotify, Chrome, etc.
  So, when a piece of software like Unity just has the OS bar, it actually ends up making it feel less professional and lower quality. I understand you said it is a lot more work to do custom title bars. But it is honestly worth it imo. The current implementation feels like the lazy way out. To be clear I am NOT saying you guys are lazy! I am just saying that as a consumer just using the software, it feels like the easy way was chosen instead of the 'right' way. I know you guys work hard! Another benefit of using a custom title bar beyond looking nicer, is that you can be much more efficient with the screenspace, and user workflow.

That is my two cents. PLEASE consider switching to a custom titlebar. It has many benefits on its own, and to solve the current issues. But I also want to reiterate that I appreciate all the hard work you guys are doing and I do like that you can minimize windows now!

 

If I have multiple project open.. and have the multiple windows sitting on my taskbar. Well, anyone can guess what's going to happen really..Far tooooo many times I was clicking the wrong window on wrong project.

 

I saw this thread a while ago and thought that the complaints were ridiculous. I think they still are.
But because people are still complaining here is my take.
When I switched to Ubuntu I could just drag the titlebar which is much easier that trying to click the tiny UI on windows. I can also snap windows to the left and the right of the screen which is a huge a plus.

Theme inconsistencies are just typical Windows issues. Windows is a dogshit desktop and every time I use it, I could complain all day long when I have to put up with it because of my HoloLens project.

 

No, they are not. Many people have already pointed out that almost every other properly made software out there does windows properly. The fact that Mac/Linux users are okay means very little to everyone using Windows 10 (I expect majority of users being there?)

 

Win32 UI is blindingly white and bitmap based. There is still no real dark mode in the OS.
That is inconsistency.
Adding custom window decorations to Unity would just add more inconsistency to all the editors and one of the reasons this change happened.
I guess it's relevant to mention that Unreal uses Windows 10 like custom window decorations if you run it on Linux.

 

Any browser, MS Office, Telegram, Discord have darkmode with the titlebar, there's literally no reason Unity can't have the same thing.

Change happened because "We don't want to render custom non-client areas on only one platform. It is expensive to maintain and error-prone". In other words, editor UX team makes life easier for themselves at expense of their users. What makes me especially angry is the fact that it's not even first time such thing happens

I don't see how this is relevant?

 

did anyone report the alt+tab issue as a bug? if not then i will..

*my report was closed as duplicate with this,
https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/is...in-the-background-and-script-changes-are-made

 

The same thing happens on Ubuntu in Unity 2021 and I always thought that was by design.

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologi...mits/ec676a3142dc3c70ed6c5b34a64fc60ae1cbac24
Good news. Menus will be moved to UIToolkit which will open possibility to create modern menu/title bar in future

 

I'm not sure I like this, I mean I like my OS native context menus, I hope they will still look the same , and not have an out of place look on Mac.

Also there is this:
* Performance - Even though we're able to populate menu with thousands of items in a second or two, it is still slower than OS solution. It appears that most of the menu creation time is spent on VisualElement creation. If we can speed it up, do let me know.

 

Good, very good. OS native stuff is pretty limited, no point in using it.

 

This looks spectacular. I was just frustrated over the huge Create Asset menu, and the inability to scroll without clicking an arrow a billion times in the native OS context menus. Being able to search in Create Asset, or have better icons or layouts and adaptation to dark mode in the context menus, is a big step in the right direction for me.

 

Cool they are on the right track! This design reminds me with the current Unity Hub context menu just the title bar left I think.

 

Any update?

 

Holy... this is BIG if true took Unity long enough to implement their own version of context menus because windows is an actual garbage fire when it comes to them. FINALLY the create menu and others will no longer be a super long unorganized list of buttons!

THE FUTURE IS NOW:

Spoiler

 

yeah but just like Unity scrollbars are skimp on useful things compared to Windows scrollbars that actually support useful shortcuts like using [shift]+ [lmb] on them to directly jump to that scroll position is already over... in Unity you have to either slowly scrolling to that position holding lmb down or drag the scrollbar like anoob.. Unity skip on things like that which is damn annoying it was mentioned years ago and fell on dead ears.

Still Windows is actual native stuff is being ruined and turning into garbage tier with every trainwreck release they do with the current people running it into the ground. So maybe Unity just building there will be better, frankly I'm tired of not having useful features like detachable menu's like Maya which would make using Unity so much easier in certain contexts... (although not if every detached menu is filling up my taskbar which seems to be a new issue with Unity now, Maya seems to manage things like this better) ... still replacing the entire toolbar/title bar with something of there own is about time aswel, maybe Unity in Windows might finally have a cohesive and professional look to it one day in the next year or two, three. I mean Adobe did the same with there products years ago.

 

So since you here i have a question regarding the context menu behaviour.

So in old context menu, when the context menu get so many menu item on it it will get long and we need to click on the botom and top of arrow to move top and bottom. Is in the new unity context menu it will behaved same or it will change like how new windows 11 context menu behaved like it has a scrollbar on the right side of context menu Or it has better implementation than both. I just curious about that. Waiting for reply!

 

Thats will be very usefull! Cant for this awesome things came out.

 

I have noticed that currently it doesn't utilize the full active displays height for displaying the content of a context view menu... resorting to a scrollbar when I'd rather it just actually display more item, so I don't have to waste time scrolling, take up 80% of displays height. at least.. providing a options to customize it...

This shouldn't be like this...




...is plenty room for it be fully expanded into the red area in this context.

 

Hopefully this is used for animation list too. We had a custom scrollable/searchable dropdown for animation properties, but not for the list in Animation Panel. in almost all of the project I've worked on this was a problem.

 

Also if it possible, it will be good if submenu item automaticly opened on mouse hover insted of button click like the native context menu behave. Because it will be painfull to click so many time to open submemu item.

 

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