Feedback Unity Editor Suggestions/Requests, Dec 2022 Edition

Currently, it looks like the Unity Forums are the official dumping ground / graveyard for user suggestions. They don't even say where in the Forums to focus them. So I thought I'd kick off yet another thread of some rough edges in the Editor which could use a little attention. [wishlist] [usability] [feedback] I don't have a lot of hope for these, but will throw them into the void anyway.

Please, add your own suggestions. Please also, don't bog down the thread with nit-picking ideas apart in detail. Let's focus on "hey, this bit kinda sucks, doing this might fix it" or "hey, there's a third-party solution to that thing you mentioned".

 

Please let me see the whole name AND a thumbnail at the same time. Sure, there's that little almost-hidden slider at the lower right to shrink thumbnails down to see a pure filename list, but that's just as bad.

 

Okay, I copied a Component. Why bury the two different Paste commands in the menus too?

 

URP isn't the only offender here, but the UI could sure help out in finding shaders.



(CodeSmile below shows that this is much improved post-2021LTS.)

 

I opened the thread think Oh no..here we go again..but this is legit.

 

When you select a shader in that list, does it print the full path in the status bar at the bottom?

 

Once I commit a choice in that list, yes, if the path to the shader asset is short enough to fit across my Inspector bar, I can see it. I can guess sometimes if that's the one I want. If it's not it, I have to play Roulette with the search bar again.

Same goes for clicking on items in the Project view. If I commit to an asset and click it and let go, it will show me the full path along the bottom. But if I am trying to grab an asset to throw into an Inspector field, now the Inspector tab switches to show details. Oy. Now I gotta find the thing I want to drop it into, click LOCK on the Inspector, go back to the Project, find the thing again, and start my drag.

Show more information before requiring a commitment that changes state.

 

Searching for Name and Type is nice, but where are all my "Characters" or "Interactive" things?

 

It looks like this in 2022.2 beta

 

Please sort out the Create Asset Menu. It is a total mess.

 

I second this for 100000000 times.

Finding the right asset is like playing Where's Wally.....

Oh switching to URP is easy, Just create a URP renderer asset then apply to the grahpic section inside player settings.


Trying to find the *rendering* in create asset menu is killing my eyes everytime.

 

Tell me about it. I've got scrollbars there on a 4k display

 

And while sorting out these awful menu's ... make them detachable including sub level menus.. its extremely useful to have ... can only think of Maya that does it properly

 

I'd like to see a standardised or recommended location where asset authors/plugins list their asset features in the drop down menus. They are all over the place

 

That's the beauty of unity when it comes to customization.
Instead of forcing some menus to be placed in predefined settings I would love to have some sort of hook or postprocess callback for the menu which would allow to move and/or remove some items inside the menu.

 

Add another couple here:

I would like a preference for the color used for the scene tint, when you've got a Prefab being edited in-scene. And another color preference for the color used for the scene tint, when you've searched for instances matching a type/name/whatever. Currently they're both one light gray color that you cannot change, and which obscures a lot of gizmos like collider outlines.

There's a preference for 2D Collider color, but not for 3D Collider color. I would also like Collider.isTrigger to have a separate distinct color, maybe not-so-hot pink or cyan but visually different from the default green.

 

Project window. Make better.
Better use of space (the left indents are at least twice what they need to be, wasting a ton of space that could be used to view your assets), no list jumping up when selecting (just bad ux), always respond (sometimes it just just stops). Make the favorites much, much more useful, not just cross project saved searches. (nested bookmarks would be nice), instead of lists and a folder tree from windows 3.11, how about a multicolumn? or at least add a horizontal scrollbar to the left column.

Edit, maybe the jumping thing doesn't happen any more.

 

It's 2023, it'd be nice if the create menu didn't suck. I'm sorry, but it's absolutely absurd that I can install a small handful of official packages and have to scroll on a 1080p display.

 

Definitely agree re: the Create menu.

On a related note, give us a list in Preferences for each context menu so that we can select which items show up in there, and anything de-selected should only show up if we navigate via the top menu. There's all sorts of stuff which I've never used or created via a right-click menu, but they're all there, all the time. The stuff I do want to access quickly is a relatively small list, so let me tell Unity what that list is.

 

This is my #1 pet peeve right now. Its honestly just schoolboy style errors in UX design and the issues with it were showing already back in the unity 4+5 days, but its stayed there the ENTIRE TIME until now.

It was bad enough before if you had some assets, but now as you say just using official packages it goes beyond the screen and is just a joke.

 

Another one i would add is the ability to work on a per-window basis:

In the Unity 2023.1 beta, editor windows now appear as separate windows (which is great)


But it still has the same behaviour as old windows, meaning that when clicking on one, all the others come up
This is annoying, especially when working in a multi-monitor setup

 

Another would be to move back the debug visualization modes (in SRP) to the scene window's draw mode dropdown



instead of having it in other places
if there's too much to fit then please use a searchable window so that we have all the debug viz organized in one place

Spoiler: Edit

searchable window like the one for components

I agree, a solution to this would be to still allow for custom positioned menus,
but to only enforce defined locations for asset store publishers

 

My god; this needs fixing so bad.

 

This is just with official packages. Once I've imported my own and things I've gotten off the asset store it's even worse.

 

I think a search menu with very good filtering is the way to go for things like that. Because it scales infinitely and both speeds up work for power user and helps teach nooby what is available.

organize things by category and then as you search results populate based on the actual typed characers but also category keywords, and if its multi-word string the order of words shouldn't matter. BAsically you should never have to remember where anything is, only a broad category, and if that doesn't bring it up, then if you can just remember either a subcategory or just what letter it started with, etc. Idea is that just vague ideas about what the tool you are looking for should be enough for the computer to find it, and also show you anything related.

Bonus is hotkey to bring up the search menu and then auto-highlight the text bar.

Maya has finally implemented this in 2023 and oh my god it is such a big time saver. Unreal is pretty good about this stuff. Since most of my work lately is in maya and unreal, going to any program that doesn't have features like this is a total drag. Like workign in Rider, of course it has plenty of search, but you have to write the exact words in order, which means you have to remember more useless details which slows things down. Having to remember where something is within a list needs to become a workflow relic of history, slows down mental speed at which you can work and increases RSI as you have to hunt and peck more.

 

Yes, I have seen this mega list a billion times before. I was merely +1ing the suggestion.

 

Yeah, I was just expanding on the issue. This is from the packages I always import on a new project, meaning the default behaviour for me is always this extremely messy, only made worse when I get things like Amplify Shader Editor or my AI frameworks in there.

 

This. Recently I found myself searching for stuff for too long in the create menu. Just recently discovered that the global search functionality (Ctrl + K) actually finds create menu items as well, which saved a lot of time for me.

 

I'm going to add this here, as it's interesting at least to have it on the list of possibile improvements

Multi-Object field editing while keeping original values



This would technically add 1 to the x positions of the objects even if these have a different position

Spoiler: Example of implementation in figma's editor ui

 

Since fields already have math support (you can enter "2.5 + 180" for example), you could definitely add support for entering "value + 1" or even "(value*2) + 0.3" and then having the multi-editor do the math with the original variations that were marked out with ---.

 

I added this in Unity 2021. See https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/EditingValueProperties.html the "Numeric field expressions" section. Your example would be typing in "+=1" into a field, that would increase the value by 1 across whole multi-selection.

 

Oh nice, thanks

I did try before posting, but opened an earlier editor version indeed

Edit: Would be nice to have this to add text to a textfield, allowing to mass rename with a suffix

 

Sprite selection is super cluttered for some reason. Can we please get an option to disable assets to be shown from packages? I literally have 5 sprites in the project and there is about ~450 sprites here. Most of them are from 2D packages like animation and sprite shapes.

 

Unfortunately doesn't work as you can see it only says 8 sprites are hidden which are mostly built in stuff. Still 450ish left to hide

 

Is there a timeline?

 

There will be when they've managed to scroll far enough to find the menu item.

 

Okay but this has been something that's been requested for years and it's a pretty significant workflow problem. A simple solution would be to actually properly use submenus until we have the ability to organize these menus ourselves without having to resort to reflection hacks.

Doing this would immediately allow us to eliminate eight lines from the default menu.

 

For the version of this menu accessed via the menu bar, better use of sub-menus is quite possibly the way to go.

For the version accessed via the context menu, though, eight lines isn't a solution, and a common complaint lately is that Unity half-solves things and then moves on, never finishing the job.

I personally believe that trying to fit everything into the context menu version is a fundamentally flawed approach. It doesn't account for the fact that different roles have very different requirements of the context menu. It needs to be customisable. There isn't a fixed configuration which would make me happy without annoying the heck out of other people on my team (which would, in turn, still annoy the heck out of me!).

I know that you probably already know this, I'm really saying it in case Unity actually looks here before acting.

Separately, I do like the searchability idea raised earlier for making all functionality accessible more easily, though it solves a different problem to the one I'm on about. One is "how do I access everything efficiently?" where the other is "how do I access the stuff I use most often as fast as possible?" Both are worth Unity's time to investigate.

 

The ultimate end game solution should be letting us organize these things ourselves. This is possible, like many things, through reflection, but to say that reflection is a hack solution would be the understatement of the century. I remember having to go through the hassle of using it back when there was no way to change the scene camera FOV, for instance.

 

HAHA HAHAHA HAHAHAHHAhahahahahahahahahhahahahhahahahahahahahhaha

 

Worth a shot!

 

Isn't this just like adding more lanes to a highway though? And how do you categorize things? Some menus might feasibly belong to multiple categories.

I think having everything in one directory that is text searchable is the most scalable way to go. The user can add tags, labels, etc to mark or differentiate favorites. A lot of programs are moving to this style, it seems to be a lot more productive IME because eliminates a step in the process of finding a thing.

FIrst step is your brain remembers a name of something.
Second step is you have to remember where it is within a directory.
Then you have to remember where to get access to that directory, subdirectory, etc.

Whereas if its one global text search and each item is marked with both default and user added labels, then the computer does the searching for us, and we only need to perform the first step. A lot less mouse use this way as well.

Another way to put it is that we could use composition in organization of the editor rather than inheritance. Instead of trying to do an impossible thing of organizing a complicated system into various folder hierarchies, we instead add "components" in the form of tags, labels, various metadata, etc and then when we search, filtering happens automatically based both on the items name but also the metadata.
This way the user can search both specific and general at the same time, and never have to waste a calorie of brain juice on remembering physical locations in hierarchies.

 

I literally gave practical examples in that very image and even said "in the meantime" because this is the easiest possible solution. But hey, I'll break it down further.

• Odds are you are not creating shader variant collections so often that you need an immediately accessible context menu option to create one
• The same applies to the scene templates and scene template pipelines. You'll probably be creating more scenes than either of those, given that scene templates are used to create multiple similar scenes. The same applies to the template pipeline
• You can apply these same things to the animation menus. Yes, games are going to be made up of a lot of animations, but grouping these together in a submenu when there are four of them in a row is pretty sensible design
• Custom font should already be in the Text submenu. It is already part of the text system and the fact it's just hanging around down there, immediately accessible, when even the TMP font stuff is in a submenu while it is likely more frequently used makes it clear that this is just outright misplaced
• How often is anyone making GUI skins for Unity's IMGUI? IMGUI as a whole is already rapidly moving to Legacy status. On top of that, the only thing that's even in the legacy submenu is the option to create a cubemap

The "more lanes on a highway" thing is not really apt here because this can also serve as better organizational structure going forward as Unity continues to cram more garbage in there. I mentioned this earlier, but adding even a few official packages completely clutters up this menu. This problem ends up being related entirely to the fact that Unity is, for lack of a better word, a disorganized mess when it comes to packages and menus. One of the most important things it could do is actually organize things.

I also made something else clear here:

"Until" is a very important word. My recommendation is to do something immediately to treat a very specific symptom until a proper cure can be deployed. Moving menu items is absolutely trivial. It is one of the easiest things you can do. It is taking a painkiller for relief until you can get proper, full medical attention.

 

Narrator: and then they found out a bunch of internal or 3rd party code that calls EditorApplication.ExecuteMenuItem with the old menu item location.

(oh yeah it absolutely should be organized better, but my experience is that even "trivial/simple" things like that aren't trivial/simple when there's like 10000 packages in the asset store, where any of them could be relying on the menu item being at exact that location)

That said. I'd love if unity's menus were searchable/filterable by "start typing, and it narrows down the whole menu". I know there have been several attempts at doing this internally, come on Unity, finish one of them and ship it. I know you can do it!

 

Murgilod I am just making conversation.

Your list of items there makes sense, but also its full of assumptions which I think is a big thing to avoid. With the simple text search there are no assumptions made at all, and if a user wants to make some things easier to find they can just add meta data, or oft-searched items can get priority placement.

 

Hey, here's a pretty important question I think: why on earth would something like this ship in production code? On top of that, this is something that can be aliased. Like, I dunno, as an example, a wild example, there's existing precedence for this in another domain with the FormerlySerializedAs attribute.

They wrote a whole system to convert Unityscript to C# and have an automatic tool that fixes deprecation issues in project files, complete with changing syntax in some cases. A context menu is, comparatively, ridiculously simple, I'd say.

Again, what I am suggesting is an interim solution. We all know how slow to add actual new features Unity can be, especially when it comes to something to that extent.

 

Because the rule of things is, if an API exists, people will use it. Why would anyone put EditorApplication.ExecuteMenuItem into their code? I don't know, but people do. And then once or if that code stops working, they first say "unity bad, broke!" (not necessarily unity: any platform that changes behavior of anything). You know, the classic xkcd. https://xkcd.com/1172/

Yes, that definitely could be done. And again, not complicated to do either, but I wouldn't say that it's "super turbo trivial, could be done in 5 minutes".

And I completely agree that the menus should be reorganized to be way more logical. And that they should also be searchable. And perhaps some way of preventing 3rd party code of making the menus "bad again" (today any code can insert menu items anywhere). I was merely pointing out that "menu reorganization is a totally trivial thing to do" might be slightly less trivial. Should still be done of course.