Feedback on the new Hierarchy panel (in 6.3)

[CiroContns]

Hey! As I was trying the new 6.3 beta, I stumbled into the pleasant surprise of the redesigned Hierarchy panel. It looks very nice! But I’d like to provide a couple of pieces of feedback.

No Enter to rename on Mac
On Mac, I can’t hit Enter to rename an object, a shortcut which is a macOS standard.
This is particularly annoying when duplicating an object, as Unity doesn’t offer to rename it right away (as opposed to when creating a new object). So when I hit Cmd+D, instead of being able to hit Enter to rename, I now have to move the mouse to the Hierarchy, left click, etc.

Almost always horizontal scroll
In general, I find the new customisable columns really nice. But it’s possible that 99% of the users will have just the GameObject’s Name and, maybe, the visibility/picking icons.

Now, the current behaviour is: the Name column doesn’t resize itself to fit unless I go right-click > Resize to Fit. The issue becomes that either I always “suffer” an horizontal scroll bar, to account for longer names which I might or might not currently have, or I have to resize the Name column to be the smallest possible, leading to having empty space on the right but still, names cut. Like here:

What I’m imagining is, could the Name column, when it’s the rightmost one, just resize itself to fit? This way you’d never have a scrollbar, but still make use of all the space that the window allows for names.
And if you add more columns, the auto-resize stops.

BUG: Not highlighting the correct object
I stumbled on at least one instance where I had an object selected in the Scene view, and the Hierarchy was highlighting another one. This can have disastrous effects, as you can imagine
The thing that worries me is that I was just using the hierarchy for 5 minutes, so there’s a possibility of a high frequency of occurrence… but I don’t have reproduction steps just yet. I’ll keep my eyes open.

//

Other than these feedbacks, I think it’s a really nice redesign, and the configurable columns are a great addition! Also the fact it’s UI Toolkit, makes modding easier. Thanks!

[CiroContns]

There we go, another reason why one might want the Name column to auto-resize: if not, you lose the little arrow that brings you into Prefab mode:

I’m starting to think it would make sense to auto-resize the Name column even if there are other columns to its right…

[sebastienlh]

Hi Ciro, thanks for the feedback!

We are still hard at work making the new hierarchy window ready for prime-time and a lot of your grievances are already known and either planned or being worked on right now. Getting the name column right is going to be the most difficult part for sure, but we are currently looking at mimicking the behaviour of the columns from the macOS finder where the name column tries to eat-up as much space as possible.

What worries me the most is the bug you are experiencing. You’re the first person to report it so far, but I will start investigating right away as this is a pretty major issue. What exact version of the editor are you using? It might help us narrow down what is going on.

And please, if you keep using the new Hierarchy window, report your findings here. We can never have too many eyes on it

[CiroContns]

Thanks Sebastien, that’s great to hear!

I will keep an eye on the bug and try to find reproduction steps. For now, my editor version is 6000.3.0b2.

[CiroContns]

I managed to reproduce the bug, it’s actually quite easy. It happens after code recompile. It seems like the Hierarchy window doesn’t refresh, leading to a mismatch in what’s selected in the Scene vs. the previous selection in the Hierarchy.

Here’s a video:

Hope it helps!

[CiroContns]

One more thing I noticed, maybe you’re aware maybe you’re not: the new Hierarchy doesn’t respect HideFlags!

[AndreaGalet]

Can somebody explain to me what is new in the Hierarchy panel?

[spiney199]

Probably UI Toolkit rather than IMGUI.

[CiroContns]

• Yes, it’s made with UI Toolkit, meaning that it’s much easier now to add icons next to the object names, etc.
• One of the nice new things is the ability to add columns to visualise and change each object’s layer, Enable flag, and other properties.
• Plus, you can customise the columns so you can remove visibility and picking (the two icons you see right now to the left), gaining space if you don’t need them.
• And I imagine that it will be possible to script your own columns, exposing properties that matter to you. Or – again – adding icons that describe what the object does/which components it has. (many assets do that today, but it’d be less hacky and more powerful)

That’s what I see so far!

[spiney199]

Yeah I’m hoping for an API to customise it a number of ways.

These are the kinds of updates to UI Toolkit that do add value over simply just getting rid of IMGUI.

[AndreaGalet]

Is there any doc or info page which I can read?

[CiroContns]

Not that I know! I stumbled on it by chance. It’s in the Preferences, at the bottom of the Editor page.

[AndreaGalet]

Do you mean that is something that you can enable or disable?

[Onigiri]

Wow, it can even show hierarchy of visual elements inside uxml asset

[CiroContns]

Yes. If you don’t see it, make sure you’re on 6.3 beta.

[sebastienlh]

Hey, sorry for the late reply; I messed up my notification settings for this thread

This is super helpful, thank you! I’ve not been able to reproduce myself on the latest build, so we will try to go from your version and se if it did not get fixed as a side-effect of another fix. This new Hierarchy is still highly volatile and we have been fixing a good number of issues since it first got introduced in 6000.3.0b2.

[sebastienlh]

On a more general note: there will be brief mentions of this new Hierarchy in the upcoming update to the user manual, but we are not yet at a point where we are happy to put a massive spotlight on it as there is still quite a bit of work yet to do. We’re hoping that people will stumble upon it organically, try it out, and give feedback; but we don’t want to give the impression that this a recommended workflow just yet.

[CiroContns]

Fair enough. For now I’ve switched back to the regular version, but I’ll be trying it a bit more here and there.

[Antoine_B]

Hey @CiroContns thank you for your feedback. We managed to reproduce the issue and fix it. I don’t have a clear ETA when the fix will be publicly available but it’s for sure going to be at least in the official stable release of 6.3 and possibly in 6.3 betas before that.

Thanks for the report again, and feel free to reach out if you find anything else.

Cheers.

[Spellbound]

Great work so far on the new hierarchy window.

We cannot fully use or test it in production unless API features are provided to add custom columns.

Since we need to support both the old and new windows, we also require a way to query which one is currently active.

In the old hierarchy window, we draw a considerable amount of extra information—primarily UI element states such as order and color propagation, component shortcuts, and various statuses—most of them with tooltips to provide additional details on hover.

Cheers,
Dirk