Clicking on UI elements in scene view selects wrong object

I have a pretty simple problem, but can’t find any mention of it online so here goes.

I expect that when I click on a Unity UI element in the scene view, the editor would consider all the elements that intersect my click and select the one that is rendered on top, like it does with other GameObjects (special rules for prefabs and SelectionBaseAttribute notwithstanding). But I’m getting almost the opposite result, where the object that gets selected seems to be the OLDEST in the click? Changing the position or rendering order or hierarchy position or viewing angle doesn’t change the priority order for me, the only pattern I can see is age. When I add new objects to the scene, that object gets prioritized LAST in my scene view clicks.

I can’t remember for how long it’s been like this, is it just me or my editor settings or is this the way things are? Is there a way to go around it so I can use the scene view to select things without having to click dozens of times? The best I can think of is adding gizmos to my “favorite” objects, but that also seems pretty clunky…

This behaviour has always been defective in some way or another.

The best was when you could steadily click through all objects and eventually find it, but even that seems to be broken now, alas.

I recently tried it in Unity 6000.0.27 and it is essentially unusable as far as clicking into anything but the most trivial of UI setups: it just never works. No amount of clicking directly on a UI object, no matter how tightly you zoom into it, will EVER select that UI object.

Not only that but Unity has deprecated the entire UnityEngine.UI system, despite UI Elements not being ready yet (their description on their own website), so don’t expect it to be fixed.

Some bright soul posting here had the idea to right-click and bring up a picklist of all items under the mouse cursor to let you click the one you want. THAT WOULD BE AMAZING!!! That one simple function would add more usability than anything else in the editor.

Thanks for the context, that’s very helpful!

You also reminded me of something I brushed past in my search: I think the solution you speak of is now reality: Select the UI object under the cursor via right click in Unity's Scene window · GitHub

If I install that, I can right-click to get a list of all the GameObjects that intersect the click, sorted by hierarchy order as far as I can tell. So that’s actually a huge step ahead, from twenty clicks down to two! It can probably be modded to just pick the highest-sorted element and save me that last click. :slight_smile:

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