Official Tell us about the UI Builder code preview panes

Personally I would love to be able to edit them directly and have it update whats being displayed. As it stands now I don't even look at them. I'll open up the files in ide and edit them that way if need be. Syntax highlighting would also be grand.

 

I'm working with UI Builder for about 2 months already, almost every day, and I see this for the first time. I just discovered that I can turn on the UXML/USS preview in UI Builder right now. And yes, it is absolutely useless for me.

When I need any understanding of how it looks like under the hood I use UI Toolkit Debugger.

 

The buttons to open the file in the editor are handy for me. Besides that, I don't remember the time when I used them. I have much more problems with the StyleSheets and Hierarchy panes, they still feel unfinished.

- I'm working with UI builder since it came out
- Not a web developer
- I never feel the need to modify UXML by hand
- I often feel the need to modify USS by hand, as it feels faster sometimes

 

Never used either preview. If I need to hand edit I open it in my IDE because it has all the text editing support I need.

 

Never used them.

 

As it is now I also find it quite useless, if I want to see the code, I also want to edit it most of the time, so I switch to the IDE where there is code highlighting as well as the possibility to customize it. As a web developer, I'm used to writing styles manually anyway.
However, it also needs a better IDE support from USS.

To do this, however, the UIBuilder would have to be changed in such a way that the entire document is not rewritten when saving, but the changes are applied incrementally so that, for example, your own formatting and comment art are not removed.

 

I never noticed them before, haha. That said, after playing around with them a bit I think I will continue to just have my IDE open in one window and the UI Builder in another. Particularly for the UXML preview I can't think of a time when I would want to see the generated UXML without editing it. For USS I'm less sure since sometimes the buttons/dropdowns for applying styles in the builder have slightly different labels from what is needed when writing USS, so having that as a reference could save a bit of trouble (the tooltips in the Builder also cover this info pretty well at the moment, though).

It's quite comfortable to build the UXML hierarchy in the builder, assign IDs, classes, etc., and I pretty much only hand-edit the UXML when I need to add something which can't be done in the builder (e.g. we make heavy use of TwoPanelSplitView, but it cannot be created from within the Builder). This makes me think that in the future I may never need to look at UXML at all. USS, however, I am always editing myself in my IDE, except for the occasional in-line style applied either in the Builder or in code.

 

About the same for me, when i need to edit the code i use a VSCode where i can set to recognize uxml as xml and uss as css, giving me syntax highlights & formatting.
Plus i usally make use of IDE tools like search or bulk edit

Would be very nice to be able to open them in the editor, like with "Script inspector 3" for example, but you'll need a whole another tool for that.
So if you remove the previews, which are small even for showing the code sometimes, it wouldn't be a big deal to me.