GUI Remove focus from an editor text field when clicking elsewhere.

Questions & Answers
1

How do you remove the focus from an editor text field when the user clicks outside of it? I know you can set the control focus to null; what I’m not sure about is how to know if the mouse click is outside the focused text field.

As a side note, the text fields are in an editor script, and they are generated on demand; they are not static, rather their amount and position changes as needed.

2

Hi,

I read through several posts and I found a working solution after some hours.

I ran into the problem that a focus on a Textfield was not removed while clicking anywhere on the main editor window. This cause many issues if you want to create a editor window with clickable areas, but non GUI elements. I wrote a EditorWindow tool to control about 100 variables over a day and night cycle with manually drawn animation curves.

50482-untitled-1.png

using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;

public class Test : EditorWindow {
	
	public string s;
	public Rect windoClickArea = new Rect(0, 0, 200, 200);

	[MenuItem("Window/Test")]
	static void Init() {
		// Get existing open window or if none, make a new one:
		Test window = (Test)EditorWindow.GetWindow(typeof(Test));
		window.Show();
	}

	void OnGUI() {

		// define click area
		Event e = Event.current;
		windoClickArea = GUI.Window(0, windoClickArea, drawWindow, "MyWindow");
		if (e.type == EventType.MouseDown && windoClickArea.Contains(e.mousePosition)) {
			Debug.Log("click");
			GUI.FocusControl(null);
		}
		//click area visible
		EditorGUI.DrawRect(windoClickArea, Color.gray);

		// Any Text Field over the predefined click area
		s = EditorGUILayout.TextField("", s);
		
	}

	void drawWindow(int aID) {
		// it's a dummy proc
	}
}

Activate the focus on the textfield and click on the lite gray area.

3

@Quatum1000 's code will work in Unity 2017.4, but It takes seconds to deselect the window, I have better solution inspired by him.

//make sure the following code is at the very end of OnGUI Function
if (GUI.Button(theWholeWindowRect, "", GUIStyle.none))
{
    GUI.FocusControl(null);
}
4

Here is the answer for Unity 2022.3.4f1, when used inside an EditorWindow (position is a Rect):

if (Event.current.type == EventType.MouseDown && position.Contains(GUIUtility.GUIToScreenPoint(Event.current.mousePosition)))
{
    GUI.FocusControl(null);
    Repaint();
}

This immediately re-draws the window after focus is lost, which is the “delay” that @tinysnake noted in their answer.