Pro Tip: Use “Load/Save Selection” to greatly enhance your workflow (Hotkey file included)

On a whim I adjusted the hotkeys for this feature and finally gave it a solid go and I was totally blown away by how much it improved my workflow, so I figured I'd share.

Ever been frustrated hunting down that same asset for the 5th time, hidden deep in a prefab, or some cavernous file structure? Or maybe you’re tired of finding the manager that houses all those scripts you need to access every hour or so. Maybe you even tried the “Save Scene Selections” before, but found the hotkeys too cumbersome to be useful.

Adjusting lots of hotkeys is invariably bound to cause conflicts, that's just one of the facts of life. But Unity does almost nothing with the prime real estate of keys 1 -10 on the keyboard. By changing the hotkey for “Toggle 2D” scene view from (2) to (Cntrl + 2) it frees us up to change the our hotkeys to be SHIFT + 1-9 and the selection of these assets to simply pressing the number keys.


I didn’t realize until last night that you can actually save selections that AREN’T in the scene view. I can't describe how empowering it was to have instant access to assets all over the project using hotkeys. All those scriptable objects, particles, abilities hiding all throughout Unity, you can quickly SHIFT + a number and have instant access to that thing at any time. Set that particle you've been tuning to 2, press 2, double click the asset in the project hierarchy, BAM you're tuning that sucker again in a fraction of a second.

No more hunting for that manager object that houses all your key balance scripts, or trying to remember where your particle system is you were tuning 3 minutes ago, just save them to a hotkey for instant access. I use the 1 key for the player controller, and 2 selects the most recent NPC that I've been tuning. By pressing 2 it also brings me directly to the location that other NPC's are stored.

I went ahead and attached a hotkey file that you can easily import if you want to try this out. You simply need to go into your "Shortcuts" and click import:


Downfall: Unity loses all the saved selections on restart. If anyone knows how to set these selections through script that would be very helpful!

Was this post a cheap ploy to reference one of the greatest TV show characters of all time? No comment. But I recently started utilizing these features and it had a PROFOUND impact on my workflow. It's not juts that you have faster access to things, more importantly, you're not sitting there frustrated at ping ponging all over your project, you stay in your groove, and you keep the momentum going rapidly tweaking and tuning at a consistent pace.

Polishing your assets over and over can be a real slog, I used to wonder if I spent more time hunting down assets than actually adjusting them. Give this workflow a try and you may be surprised how much it improves your productivity.

If anyone from Unity sees this... Can we get the scene to remember what selections we made? That would be awesome. It would also be great if these were the default hotkeys.

 

Until then: https://forum.unity.com/threads/can...ors-save-load-selection.1089049/#post-8774590

 

Oh great, so it is possible to set these via script. I'll check this out later and maybe customize it a bit so it works with my hotkeys.