I was doing some research regarding custom theming in Unity, and I found this post (Evolving the Unity Editor UX | Unity Blog) on the official Unity Blog. It dates back to 2019. At the end, a concept for a total editor redesign was presented:
"Below is a concept visualization of several future UX improvements under investigation: We’re reimagining tools and actions to bring them closer to the user’s area of focus and help them stay in their creative flow. Additionally, this concept explores Workspaces that enable users to easily create and switch between Editor layouts that are optimized for specific tasks, e.g., World Building, Animation, Lighting, etc."
It seems that, after all these years, the concept may have been scrapped, which I personally find depressing :(.
What are your thoughts on it? I think the concept it’s pretty neat! Such a shame we only have that image…
The UI did certainly get an overhaul by now. Think most of what we see here has been brought in some form of another. E.g. the context-aware tools you see there on the left of the main screen.
What we do not have is that secondary tabs section right below the standard dropdown menus.
It does surely look neater in that screenshot but that’s typical for mock-ups. Does not automatically mean they’d be compatible with the software. E.g. what would the animations and Profiling tabs look like and is it really better to have that extra bar for things like those if separate windows (which we currently have) would fulfill the same purpose and in fact be more flexible?
What aspects of that concept image do you wish were in place?
I like the idea of the Terrain tools and similar items being moved from the Inspector into the Scene view. That has been possible for a long time now, and many extensions or 3rd party tools make use of it.
Rather than redesigning the layout around the top of the screen, I’d much prefer that they make it configurable, so that everyone can put whatever is important to them there.
Isn’t it just the Layout drop-down, but taking up a lot more space?
Not the default Layout menu, but I suppose it would be possible to add shortcut to custom layouts there and that’s what the buttons in that design might be meant to do as well (unless they’d restructure the Animation and Profiler windows to somehow not be dockable windows anymore).
Having a proper asset library would be a major timesaver
Changes to the project browser allowing for vertical orientation since widescreen displays have meant we’ve had a surplus of horizontal space for nearly two decades now
Terrain brushes being a popout instead of locked into the inspector element, making them less awkward to access
Layout tabs like in Blender would be a major time saver, especially for things like UI design and other things where you wouldn’t normally be working directly in the scene view (prefab editors are not ideal for this)
Unity’s overall UI has effectively remained pretty unchanged for a long, long time, and that’s a problem when it can be increasingly cumbersome to work with when you’re dealing with expanding projects or projects that are of a relatively larger scope.
By project browser you mean “Assets”, right?
For simple files and folders that is surely great, but how would you visualize things with thumbnails like meshes and sprites in that view? The space this mock has reserved for assets would be way too small for me at least.
This if from MacOS’s finder, and it’s not even good, but assuming you have a decent way to go “up” the hierarchy (by either showing the path somewhere, or having an up / back button), can’t you imagine a verical view like this being useful?
But I think that allowing just this would also be fine (maybe it auto switches to this when the width is below some threshold).
