Use placeholder text in CustomEditor

Unity Engine
1

There’s some way to put a placeholder text(you know, italic in gray) in the string box using custom editor or property drawer?

Here a example of string box photoshoped to look like I want:

2

There’s not a nice way to do this out of the box, but you could draw a GUI.Label with a grey/italicized style over the text field when it is empty.

I’ve made note of this feature request.

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3

haha I think about that yesterday before get sleep “maybe I could draw a text over the thex field and use a conditional to show it only when the text field is empty or not selected” xD

Now I only have one dobt left: There’s a way to check when the field is selected or clicked?

Thanks in forward!

4

Not without reflection. You’ll need to call the internal TextField passing an ID you get yourself from GetControlID. Then use that ID to check EditorGUI.activeEditor.IsEditingControl(id).

5

Ok, going to try my best on this workaround, thanks for answer!

6

Here’s how I managed to implement this feature

string PlaceHolderTextField(Rect rect, string input, string controlID, string placeHolder = "Enter Value...")
{
    if (Event.current.type != EventType.Layout)
    {
        GUI.SetNextControlName(controlID);
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(input) || GUI.GetNameOfFocusedControl() == controlID)
            return GUI.TextField(rect, input);
        else
            GUI.TextField(rect, placeHolder, greyTextField);
    }
    return input;
}

Simply make sure the controlID is unique

Note: downside is GUI.TextField doesn’t allow to paste values… and EditorGUI.TextField doesn’t work GUI.SetNextControlName and GUI.GetNameOfFocusedControl functions afak

1 Like
7

I think you could do it like this:

//make an italic style textarea for the placeholder
                var placeholderTextStyle = new GUIStyle(EditorStyles.textArea);
                placeholderTextStyle.fontStyle = FontStyle.Italic;
                //Output the real text field
                myText = EditorGUI.TextArea(myRect, myText);
                //if thats empty output a disabled dummy one
                if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(myText))
                {
                    EditorGUI.BeginDisabledGroup(true);
                    EditorGUI.TextArea(myRect, "Placeholder Text", placeholderTextStyle);
                    EditorGUI.EndDisabledGroup();
                }
2 Likes