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Feedback Layouts need some attention

Discussion in 'Editor & General Support' started by Noisecrime, Jul 11, 2020.

  1. Noisecrime

    Noisecrime

    Joined:
    Apr 7, 2010
    Posts:
    2,051
    So i'm doing some housekeeping on my machine and with Unity. Part of this is trying to refactor all the various editor layouts I've made over the years. Only to realize that on the whole its a bit of a waste of time due to inefficiencies and lac of foresight in the design of the layout feature.

    With that in mind here are some proposed changes to improve QoL with working with layouts.


    1. 2019.4 Changed the cache location!
    This had me puzzled for quite sometime, as up till now all Unity 5+ layouts were stored in
    C:\Users\<NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Editor-5.x\Preferences\Layouts
    and could be re-used by future versions of Unity.

    At some point this appears to have changed and for 2019.4 at least it saves them to
    C:\Users\<NAME>\AppData\Roaming\Unity\Editor-5.x\Preferences\Layouts\default

    Now I seem to remember writing a custom layout editor script, so i'll have to double check I didn't cause this, though a fresh Unity 2019.4 project is defaulting to that directory so I don't think its user error.

    Anyway this is annoying and would seem like a bug, not sure what if anything can/will be done about that now though? For now I guess i'll have to just duplicate all my layout.wlt files in two locations.

    Edit:
    Further investigation suggests that something changed in the wlt format as these 2019.4 layouts will not open in Unity 5.6. Though it leaves me puzzled as to why these are still saved into the Editor-5.x preferences directory and even more strangely into a 'default' folder.

    Whatever version this change occurred in I would have expected a new editor folder like in the past ( e.g. Editor-3.x, Editor-4.x, Editor-5.x ) and so it should be Editor-2019.x. This would clearly delineate that the wlt format had changed and make more sense in locating the layouts.


    2 - 4 Removed
    I was moving between Unity 5.6 and 2019.4 while doing the 'housekeeping' and some things appear to have been addressed in later versions that I didn't pick up - removing some points until I can clarify.


    5. Import/Export Layout options
    As the location of layouts appears to have changed ( see point 1 ) being able to import/export wlt layouts would be useful for moving them around and between Unity versions without the user having to dig around in various 'appData' locations that Unity uses.


    6. Visual Representation
    This is more a wishlist thing, but if the layout system gets some attention I would love to see a popup display when hovering over a layout that shows a representation of the layout ( based on current dimension of the editor ).

    Initially I thought lets just save a thumbnail of the editor appearance when saving the layout, but that's a bit heavy in terms of resource use and as a thumbnail size may not be very helpful.

    So instead I'd propose that the wlt layout is parsed and a simple color block representation of all the tabs be shown. Where each window/tab is colorized based on type. This would provide an at a glance visual representation of the layout to facilitate choosing the most appropriate one for your project.
     
    Last edited: Jul 11, 2020
    jashan likes this.