GUILayout.MinHeight and EditorGUILayout.BeginScrollView not respecting layout options.

I suspect I’m just misunderstanding what the various GUILayoutOptions are supposed to do. I’m not actually looking for a workaround, my research has found a few of those; I’m just looking for help to clear up my confusion.

I’d like a fairly simple text control in the editor.

  • It should always be at least 60 units
    high, if all the text can fit
    vertically.
  • If the text cannot fit vertically in
    60 units, it should expand
    vertically, to the height of the
    text, but at most 500 units.
  • If the text is larger, vertically
    than 500 units, a scroll bar should
    be shown.

Now I had EXPECTED the following code to create an extreemly simple control like that:

  textScrollPosition = EditorGUILayout.BeginScrollView(textScrollPosition, GUILayout.ExpandHeight(true));
  mytext = EditorGUILayout.TextArea((mytext, GUILayout.MinHeight(60), GUILayout.ExpandHeight(true), GUILayout.MaxHeight(500));
  EditorGUILayout.EndScrollView();

It does NOT work as expected, so I did some troubleshooting, and I’m clearly not understanding the results, or perhaps, the intention of these functions/parameters:

Let’s start with GUILayout.MinHeight. I would expect this to specify the minimum height a control should be. I would NOT expect it to affect the maximum height of the control.
But the following code displays a text area that is 60 units high: All the time, regardless of the text.

   mytext = EditorGUILayout.TextArea((mytext, GUILayout.MinHeight(60), GUILayout.ExpandHeight(true), GUILayout.MaxHeight(500));

If I exclude the MinHeight, it expands/contracts properly based on the text. But it CAN also be less than 60 unit high, which is what I wanted to avoid.

What am I misunderstanding about the GUILayout.MinHeight option?

I’m also unclear what’s going on with the layout system when I use EditorGUILayout.BeginScrollView. If I enclose the above text area, in a scroll view, the height of the text box changes to only two lines of text. Even if I assign the GUILayout.ExpandHeight(true) option, to the scroll view, it still limits the text to two lines.

If I follow the limited examples in the docs, and use a SPECIFIC height option, for the scrollView, like GUILayout.Height(300): THIS option IS respected by the scroll view.

What am I misunderstanding about the “automatically layouted” scroll view?

I’ve seen other answers that go and compute the height of the text and stuff like that, to feed a fixed GUILayout.Height option to the ScrollView and Text Area: and I can certainly do this as a last resort, but I’d like an explanation of what it is that I’m not understanding in the GUILayout system. What incorrect assumptions am I making?

This may help: Why is GUILayout.MinHeight applying a maximum height to my element? - Questions & Answers - Unity Discussions