Idiomatic Unity approach to Canvas blocking editing your scene

I started building a scene at 0,0,0. I added a canvas. To the canvas I have now added a border of buttons. These overlap with my scene preventing me from interacting with it.

I have one of three options, none of them seem very smart and I'm wondering if there's a better idomatic Unity approach?

1. Manually disable and re-enable the canvas every time I want to edit my scene.
2. Disable all the canvas elements that are currently overlapping my scene and add a script that on start, re-enables them using .SetActive(true). This isn't too bad as I can put everything inside an object whose sole job is to be inactive until the game is running (unless I need to edit them in which case there's only one check box I need to toggle).
3. Move my whole scene down by 100 (wish I had known this at the start)
4. Move the canvas (not possible)

Thoughts welcome. How do other people deal with this?

 

I deal with it by having all the UI elements on a UI layer, and then have visibility for that layer toggled off - you can do that in the upper-right corner of the editor in the "Layers" dropdown.

I've also set that up with a little shortcut, so ctrl+U toggles between UI mode and normal mode:

Code (csharp):

1. // This goes in an editor folder or editor-only asmdef
2. public static class EditorCommands {
3.     [MenuItem("Commands/Toggle UI Layer")]
4.     public static void ToggleUILayers() {
5.         var uiLayer = LayerMask.GetMask("UI");
6.  
7.         if (Tools.visibleLayers != uiLayer)
8.             Tools.visibleLayers = uiLayer;
9.         else
10.             Tools.visibleLayers = ~uiLayer;
11.     }
12. }

 

Thank you. This is significantly better.

I had to make a minor change to the

~uiLayer & ~Layer.Mask.Map;

part as I couldn't find

Layer

:

Code (CSharp):

1. using UnityEditor;
2. using UnityEngine;
3.  
4. public static class EditorCommands
5. {
6.     [MenuItem("Commands/Toggle UI Layer")]
7.     public static void ToggleUILayers()
8.     {
9.         var uiLayer = LayerMask.GetMask("UI");
10.  
11.         if (Tools.visibleLayers != uiLayer)
12.             Tools.visibleLayers = uiLayer;
13.         else
14.             Tools.visibleLayers = ~uiLayer;
15.     }
16. }
17.  

 

Whoops, I thought I had modified my example to work, missed some of it. We've got a map layer that we never want to see for... reasons, so that's expluded there. I updated my post.