Hi all, I know this is an old topic.
But the last movement on this was in 2018. Unfortunately we haven’t had any options since.
I really just want to remove or replace the default grey cube icon with a blank.
There is just so much visual noise, especially in a project with a lot of (non-prefab) gameobjects.
Reasons:
- The Grey Cube is visually stronger than any Alphanumeric character. This makes it harder to read at a glance. With more similar visual elements in a line item, our brains are less efficient in filtering out the noise.
The Grey Cube has high contrast and readability (nice work on the icon!) but it’s also visually bigger and brighter than any alphanumeric character. The actually useful information, which is the GameObject’s Name, is for some reason less visually significant than the cube.
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The Grey Cube visually overpowers the arrow foldout.
At a glance, I can’t see which objects have children or not. The Arrow foldout is important information, that tells me something unique about the object. It’s also a click target, so it has functional purpose. The Grey Cube has zero functional purpose, and zero informational purpose. -
We already know that is a GameObject. Only gameobjects can exist in there anyway. The little grey cube is redundant, and it’s visually distracting. I understand having the Grey Cube for when the object is in a field. Or in any picker. But in the Hierarchy, where everything must by definition be a GameObject, the huge grey cube is redundant.
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The Grey Cube shows zero additional information about the object. It doesn’t show if the object is static, or enabled/disabled, etc. It’s as if Unity appended a big letter in front of every single gameobject’s name just to make everything less readable.
Note that this doesn’t apply to Prefabs. The blue cube for prefabs is fine (if a big large…)
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The Grey Cube is even more overpowering when a GameObject is disabled. Our visual system is not linear. The effective visual delta between the Grey Cube and the GameObject Name is even higher when the hierarchy item is disabled.
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The Grey Cube takes up valuable horizontal space.
Especially when working on a laptop, space is at a premium. I’d rather see more of the gameobject name, especially when hierarchy gets deep and nested, we start losing the name of the object. The Grey Cube adds an additional horizontal space every indent, before the relevant information is shown (the gameobject name).
Proposed solutions:
I know development is difficult, and i could be totally out of line with these suggestions. Maybe they’re impossible or out of scope, but I tried to come up with feasible solutions.
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Allow replacement of The Grey Cube texture.
I tried digging into the Unity resources in the editor, but unfortunately I couldn’t find and replace the cube icon… I would if I could. I’d just replace it with a blank image. That’s all I want, really. -
Tweak The Grey Cube to be visually smaller.
I know that giving customizability is difficult. Maybe just tweak the visuals so it’s just less powerful than the actual important information. The Cube Icon could really stand to be half the size of what it is now. It would become a “bulletpoint” instead. -
Allow a Tint to the Grey Cube icon.
This could be placed inside of Preferences > Colors. Then users could easily tint it to be dimmer or brighter depending on what they want.
I’m sure the hierarchy drawing code is more gnarly than I can ever imagine, but perhaps the GreyCube could be drawn using this Color setting. -
Make “Select Icon” actually change the icon of the gameobject.
This great feature, where you can click the Grey Cube in the inspector, allows you to add a red, green, blue, or even a custom icon to the gameobject to be visible in the scene view.
Unity - Manual: Assigning icons
Maybe this icon could show up in the hierarchy, replacing The Grey Cube?