Hi all,
We’d like your feedback on new the browser like feature for the inspector. Following is a video showcasing the features:
It adds a toolbar to the inspector with back/forth buttons, a history menu and a favorites menu. All of it can be used to navigate to previous selections.
You can download an experimental build to try it by yourself:
Super glad to see this might become a feature! I think this will be super helpful. The current implementation, however, is not great.
Most importantly: really need to support mouse button 4 & 5 for navigation. I can’t remember the last time I clicked a back arrow in my browser.
The favorites are clunky for a bunch of reasons:
Can’t add multi selections. Adding groups of related objects is really needed. Would also need to be able to name these groups.
No hotkeys to select favorites.
Related to those two: The goal of favorites seems to be the same as for Edit->Selection->Save/Load selection. These concepts definitely need to be merged. Could then also reuse the existing Ctrl-Shift / Ctrl-Alt hotkeys
Adding scene objects like in the video just doesn’t seem to work at all for me?
The favorites should not be stored in editor settings, it is not related to the other settings there at all. This will also be confusing serialization wise if scene objects ever work. I also don’t think favorites should be on version control as people will have different selection needs in a team. I think a selection section in Preferences would be more appropriate.
Some other tidbits:
Some way to open a saved selection in new inspector would be great - maybe do a popout if you hold alt?
Some way to add to a selection - maybe hold ctrl/shift while clicking the item?
Interaction with locking the inspector is a little weird. Doesn’t seem to respect locks. Should probably popout a new inspector if current one is locked.
Feels like this system should not just be part of the inspector, but be unity wide, as it also handles scene view & project browser navigation. I would really want to be able use MB 4 & 5 to navigate regardless of where my inspector is or whether it is even open. This will make navigating the project browser much easier.
Can add same object multiple times to favorites. Seems like that shouldn’t be allowed.
When deselecting - it does add an entry to the history, can undo the deselect, but can’t use the browser arrows.
And then it’s just generally buggy:
Sometimes when multi selecting it shows up as a single selection in the history. Vica versa, single selections can show up as a multi select. Sometimes it just straight up lists the wrong object… Just select a bunch back and forth with two objects sometimes multi selecting, sometimes clearing history, and you’ll get all kinds of strange behavior.
Clear history leaves last selected object in, even when that object is not selected anymore.
When selecting folders the history gets really buggy. Doesn’t list some folders, only selects root assets sometimes, or only 1 level deep sometimes
Select some stuff → Undo all the way back → Select something new. Can’t undo that selection.
So yeah, great idea, but feels like a rushed implementation. Here’s hoping for a V2.0 build
I’ve only seen the video, and while your steps are in a good direction, a feature that’s sorely missing is some kind of search/filter.
Being able to fill in a search field with a (partial-)component name (ie. I only want to see my Colliders, not the 20 other components on this game object"). This can be done with a custom inspector now, but it’ll be very at home in your browser.
On top of that, searching for exposed fields (ie. “Show me all fields with radius in the name”) would be great. (this is similar to a UE4 feature and it’s super helpful in full inspectors.
This can be a single input field with a drop list of types “Components, Fields, etc.”
Favorites will be handy when working with big scenes but it seems a bit difficult to use in it’s current version.
I think having a simple “Star” icon that is a checkbox that you can select or deselect to add an item to the list is a way better way to go.
Nice looking feature, only via video not tried it.
When you select the object from this new menu, could you make the editor camera jump to make it visible? Or at least make that be an option in the settings?
I used to use this asset called Scene View Bookmarks that lets the editor camera jump to various fave views/objects, but alas not available now:
I would prefer it as an own window instead of using a dropdown menu something similar to photoshop history visually, maybe even with some “favourites” star like Steam has for games, so that it would “pin” the favourites on top of most recent used gameobjects while other recent ones stack up beneath
Really like the browser-like features. Well done! I’m sure there are more you could implement too. Also, much like websites, I’m holding out hope that you might allow game objects to be tagged with more than one tag. I would love to apply multiple tags to a single game object.
Idea is good, the actual video showing the implementation can be a lot better, here some suggestions.
Adding this feature to small dropdown menu’s is somehow a bit dodgy. It’s too small and you need quite some muscle memory to master that. However it would be a nice feature to have in a separate window which would also be easily expanded / collapsed, like Photoshop history.
For example, everything you click (game objects, materials and such) get recorded into the history with also icons in front based on what it is. Sometimes you find yourself in a situation where you click a lot on the same object, so you can favorite it. When it’s a favorite object, this will appear in a section under the history log with a certain icon in front. So the icons can be a visual guide for muscle memory actions and you don’t need to read the text of the list.
While this history is being recorded, you can also search / filter that list if it’s too long to scroll trough. You can for instance filter on materials, objects or whatever and when you continue, this filter can stay active or being deactivated again.
If you don’t like the recorded list, you can collapse it and leave only a list of favorites, but also that one can be collapsed if you want to.
At last, the favorite list is also reorder-able, you can change it with custom icons (also history list can have custom icons) and it saved together with the project settings (just not the history, only favorite list).
Looks awesome, have missed this a lot. Please add back/forward to the Project View as well, that is the actual browser, where the toolbar should be, not the inspector!
And while you’re at it, please allow custom Project Views in the same way that custom inspectors are allowed, to this day making elaborate editors involving multiple asset files is hugely limited by not having access to instantiate and mod Project / Files views.
I love to have the browser like features in inspector, maybe you could consider all the good and bads of each of our implementations. In my case for example, I can drag objects from the custom window to/from the other windows and works like for example assigning a public field from a component, etc.
Features:
Stores history of selected objects (custom count).
Selects objects from the history (with left click).
Pings (focus) objects from the history (with right click or Ping button).
Drag objects from history to other object fields to link them.
Drag assets (folders, scripts, etc) from history to the project browser to move them.
Great idea. As mentioned before a seperate window could be nice. A modifier key plus click could allow to focus the selected element within the Scene. It would be nice to be able to freeze and store the state of the history. That would allow to switch between different groups of selections. But that would not be a history of selected objects anymore
Nice idea… already addressed for a long time by very good plugins on the asset store.
For example, instead of reinventing the wheel you could give a look and acquire them by contacting the developers (as you did with Text Mesh Pro).
This is a great one: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/4237 (from @Flipbookee ) that also integrates well with https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/14032 (from @thienhaflash )
Unity editor really needs a huge fast forward improvement on this subject. Is unbelievable that a developer should search and buy additional assets to have access to this core and mandatory features. Is like having to buy the alignment feature for a word processing software.
At every new project is like to feel naked until you import at least 3 or 4 core plugins.
Yes, there should be back, forth and history buttons in the Project view to select most recently selected assets only, but also in the Scene and Hierarchy views to select most recently selected game objects only.
Still as shown demonstrated video …having the < > nav arrows, and also 2 dropdowns for history and favorites is good for me… but if the inspector width was expanded… then that empty space could be filled by allowing the user to have those minitabs… which makes it quicker to see and jump back to a specific earlier selection… or maybe another dropdown menu for the project setting stuff and make it so project setting windows also show up in that history…
Huge thumbs up for this feature, it’s been on my list to implement something like this for our team for a very long time!
The big important bit on top of making this easy to use and convenient (things like easy access from hotekys, separate between assets/hierarchy so you can clearly see which selections were assets and which not, being able to quick type to filter and find what you want, etc) it’s important to expose good API so that we could show history views using our custom tools when it makes sense.
Support back and forward mouse buttons (buttons 4 and 5) like pyloon said
If the entry in the History/Favorites list is a gameobject in the scene, show which scene that object belongs to. It’s useful if there are multiple scenes loaded. Also have an icon to indicate what type of asset it is. (see attached screenshot)
Have a separate dedicated editor window to show the settings for the History and/or Favorites (instead of it being inside the Editor Settings window), but keep the Inspector’s browser UI. Because I like the quick-access of it being always present in the Inspector.
Icon that indicates what type of asset it is (window, scene file, folder, etc.) If it’s a game object in the scene, there’s an indication what scene it belongs to. I have two scenes loaded here “Test1” and “Test2”.
