Using Unity 2020.2.0b5.3233.
When Gizmos are disabled I can’t select UI elements. Need to enable Gizmos first.
With disabled Gizmos I still can select them through Hierarchy and then, e.g., move them on the Scene.
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This still irks me as well. Selecting UI with disabled Gizmos used to work, but in 2020.2 it stopped. Was this intended for a specific reason or should we report a bug?
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Hi,
Thanks for bringing this up. We were able to reproduce the issue and the devs are looking into it. You can check on the resolution status here: Unity Issue Tracker - Cannot select UI GameObjects in the Scene view when gizmos are disabled
Please consider submitting a bug report in the future when you encounter issues like this.
3 Likes
The issue has been marked as Won’t Fix, but I don’t think this change is a good one.
For a long time, it was possible to select UI GameObjects when Gizmos were toggled off and now this is considered a bug, but I think it’ll annoy more people than help them. As an example, I built a tool for the Asset Store that allows users to select objects including UI in the scene more easily and it relies on objects being selectable. Now, my tool doesn’t work if Gizmos are disabled, which is confusing my users, prompting them to send me bug reports that my tool doesn’t respond to selection.
I really don’t see how Gizmos are related to selection in general. Sure, some Gizmos can be selected, but in general, if I turn of Gizmos, I can still select any 3D or 2D object in the scene, so why shouldn’t I also select UI GameObjects?
@LeonhardP Not sure if you have any influence on this topic, but would it be possible to revisit this decision and bring it up again within the team?
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I just upgraded from 2019 LTS to 2020 LTS (yeah, quite late) and this “bug” really bugs me. If you have the Hand-tool active, you can’t select anything. You have to first activate Move, Rect or some other tool, very annoying.
I’m grateful I found this post, because I first thought my installation was broken.
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Yeah, I looked again at switching from unity 2019 to 2020 yesterday and had forgotten that this was one of the most annoying regressions I hit when I last tested 2020. I remember losing a whole bunch of time frustrated at why I couldn’t edit any UI when I first tried out 2020 and googling for help etc until I found a bug report corresponding to this.
Having a ‘wont fix’ bug for this issue that doesn’t let people vote for this to be fixed is also kind of frustrating. Saying that UI elements are “not normal renderers” sounds like a minor technical detail that shouldn’t really matter here.
For any developers that deal with a lot of world space UI elements this is a very noticeable UX regression and even if they are technically rendered like gizmos under the hood the previous design that allowed us to interact with UI elements by default was much more usable.
I often want to toggle all gizmos off to avoid visual clutter but now that’s awkward because I basically always need to be able to modify UI elements, which conceptually are just first-class components in the scene.
Imagine if you couldn’t interact with the transform tools for translating, rotating and scaling 3D objects if you didn’t turn on all gizmos that would be silly but it seems like that’s basically what’s been done for UI components here.
I really hope someone at Unity reevaluates this issue and the current ‘wont fix’ response.
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Also found this thread with others getting confused by this design: Can't see anchors on UI?
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Just ran into this. Was checking the locked layers and UI was not locked, couldn’t figure out for the life of my why I was not able to select UI elements. Thanks to this thread I found it was from Gizmos being disabled. This is flawed design, or a bug. Hope Unity changes their mind and fixes it.
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Any plans to change this?
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We’d also really like to see that change reverted!
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I agree with you guys. I had to switch to 2020 as well and this is definitely one of the “highlights” of their new, broken designs, which are getting into Unity. There are more, but this one is really something. I’ve been using Unity for more than 8 years and I’m increasingly frustrated with every major update since Unity 5.x, which was great…
Just to add my 2 cents to their “resolution”, which says that UI objects are not normal GameObjects. From user point of view, that is completely irrelevant and also pretty stupid. User sees those UI objects in scene and can manipulate with them the same way as with any other GOs. They simply made the Unity interface less user friendly and made it “by design” because some coder/manager in Unity was too proud to acknowledge his/her failure.
The only way is probably to submit a “feature request” to let users select UI GOs even when Gizmos are disabled 
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This is actively terrible UX. Just burned hours trying to figure out why the heck I can’t edit UI.
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They reproduced this bug 2 years ago but they did nothing as always
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Still there. 2022.3.x, can’t select UI elements by clicking on them in the Scene view.
3D icons are terrible and you can’t deactivate them all at once so put their size at 0 by sliding the bar to the extreme left side so they’re not visible anymore and don’t clutter the view uselessly.
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Still the same for 2022.3.24f1.
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Really annoying bug 
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Ran into this too - had no idea why I suddenly couldn’t and thought I had bricked my project. Google search brought me here.
Still here in Unity 6 Preview (6000.0.21f1).
It seems a rather annoying way to leave things moving forward.
Have the same issue on 2022.3.39f1
Super unintuitive ux behaviour. Registers as a bug for me. Had to google the reason as to why I could not select my UI objects.