Playing with layouts!
Objective: Pass on some tips on how to organize your Unity editor window in order to become more efficient.
This article assumes the reader has taken the initial steps of installing a copy of Unity Hub, Unity Editor, and created a Unity user account (in order to access all the peripheral treasures available from Unity). There are many tutorials available to this effect, or you may read my articles on the subject.
Unity, by default, will layout its Editor in the following fashion:
Now at first, it appears to be quite dandy. After a while though, I found a few nagging issues. One of them was the constant requirement to flip between the Scene and Game views. The second one was the fact that my Hierarchy and Inspector windows were at opposite ends of my screen. Let's fix the first two issues.
A nice thing with the Unity Editor is that all the windows are modular. This means that you can grab each tab and snap them anywhere you wish, either within the existing main window or anywhere else on your desktop.
So with this in mind, let’s simply grab the Game window and snap it below the Scene window. This will permit us to see live what any of our changes appear in the Game environment. Nice!
Do the same thing with the Hierarchy. Grab its tab and snap it to the right so it sits between the Scene/Game windows and the Inspector windows. The result so far should look like this:
A third issue is that, in my Project window, I can never have more than a single folder open at a time. Let’s fix this as well…
At the top-right of the Project window, you will see a small padlock with a stack to its right. Click on the stack and select One Column Layout. You can then take the Project window and snap it under the Hierarchy, leaving the Console below the Game window.
Fine-tune as required to satisfy your own personal taste and when ready, save your new custom profile. I went ahead and called it “Professional”. This custom layout will be available every time you work on your projects.
The last nagging issue (and one that has caught me way too many times — other Unity devs knowingly nod here…) has to do with forgetting that you are in Play mode while testing your project. As you will soon find out, any changes made to your project while in Play mode will not be saved. By default, the color scheme in Unity does not change when you go into Play mode. You can modify this!
By going to Unity, Preferences, then Playmode tint, you can modify the tint of the other windows when Unity goes into Play mode. This will give you a fail-safe warning to exit Play mode before making any changes to your game.
The resulting change is this:
Quite drastic! Very nice! I will admit this little change has saved me from so much frustration, especially late at night when everything blends together.
There you have it. Take the time to play with the layout. This is what was recommended to me by the mentors from GameDev HQ, but at the end of the day, it’s a question of personal preference. In a perfect world, I would have multiple screens connected to my workstation and would be able to maximize selected windows in order to make things easier on my aging eyesight! Maybe someday…
If you’ve found these tips useful, pass them around. See you next time and thanks for reading :)
