The top bar on the Unity editor is pretty unsightly, especially considering when run in dark mode with other applications also in dark mode on multiple displays. It stick out like a bright sore thumb.
From a companion program Visual Studio, I’ve made some mock ups of what I hope the future Unity editor can look like with the dark theme. While Unity is revisiting the UI, I hope they can take this oversight of darkness into account
PS: To Unity… it’d be nice to take a note from Microsoft’s documentation that has a “Dark Theme” support on all their pages, and allow the Unity docs to be dark officially, without having to hack around with a CSS override.
I would love to be able to hide the top bar and the toolbar altogether. It eats up lot of screen space and all these items can be linked to hotkeys anyway.
As far as UI goes, the best example out there is photoshop. You can completely customize every single feature. This is the gold standard Unity should look at – at least as far as UI goes. Maya also has a great UI. Again, you can disable every single element from it and have a totally blank viewport. THen quickly access whatever menu/tool you need with contextual marking menus. Very fast, very clean, and all attention is on the viewport where it should be.
It is especially problematic for artist to evaluate lighting and coloring if you have strong contrast anywhere else on the screen. Even in playmode we are stuck with this top bar, so how can we evaluate the end-product precisely as the end user will? That’s no good. We shouldn’t need to build every time we want to evaluate some small artistic change.
Probably some programmers might scoff at things like this. But the more options and tools the artist/level designers got, the better looking games you are going to see coming from unity. THe faster, easier, and more accurately they can iterate and experiment, the more chance you get to hit home with awesome art. And that means more money to potentially earn. And who doesn’t want more money?
Unreal is still a little better, but 2019 has made some nice improvements. It is nice to see little QOL stuff like this come into the radar. At least for me, an artist who does most work in editor, every little 0.5% speed boost adds up towards much more work enjoyed and greater productivity.
(I voted yes by the way. Greater user control is always plus in my book)
My topbar is the color I selected for the OS(windows), same as all other topbars for all other programs.
why not change that to a darker shade?
not to say I’d mind having control over it from unity. +1 to getting rid of it ( @BIGTIMEMASTER just have it pop down when you put the cursor against the top, no need to put extra shortcuts in)
I know Unity is terrible with UI design in general, but I thought this thread is a joke for dark theme design, when I noticed bright top bar above dark “rest”. Never really took notice on other threads, discussing dark theme.
But I just searched online images and the bright bar is there indeed.
Form design point of view, yes top bar should be consistent with rest of theme.
Yep, I did pointed out while ago similar, once or twice. Like making bright game, using dark editors.
However, people claim for eyes disorders and whats not, yet fight over making everything dark. Yet having OS in bright theme?
So who is fooling who really?
It means, than when you move mouse to the top edge of the screen, the whole bar shows up. Just like menu starts, when clicking on the option. Then when moving mouse away, the bar hides itself. Then shortcuts are just optional preferences of the user.
I don’t think you can? Don’t think even it is necessary, since you can unpin and drag individual windows / tabs.
Then you make full screen if you like, with almost no bar on top. Or / And move to another monitor, if having one.
Would be nice to remove. All the tools can be reached with hotkeys. As for menus, let the bar minimize by pressing shift+m or something. It uses lots of screen space for something you only need to access occassionally.
I am still not understanding what @SparrowsNest was talking about. I can’t find a way to make unity enter fullscreen mode (f11) like other programs.
I can’t agree more, and like that Photoshop and other programs have an option to eliminate more and more of the UI, in the case of Photoshop by pressing a simple hotkey F. This makes it easy to switch to modes where you want the screen real estate. This matters, and I hope Unity is listening.
@SparrowsNest I’m running Win 10 in Dark mode, but this is still how it appears.
If I go to Settings > Colors and all the way at the bottom select “Title Bars and Windows Borders” then the top strip of Unity changes to that color, but the menu bar stays white.
Also, I don’t want to have to change that color. I use that Windows color to highlight menus and things, so want it to be bright/high contrast… Which is exactly what I don’t want for a title bar, which should not draw pointless attention. (The whole purpose of the original post)
Both browsers have easy support for profiles, so if you don’t want everything to be dark, you can have a profile for browsing resources in dark mode easily.
