Visual studio and many IDEs have a back and forward buttons.
Those allow you to navigate through the places you visit in the order you visit them.
One of the biggest issue with Unity editor, is when you open a prefab, and then another prefab, or when you navigate folders in the project, you just can’t go back to the last place you visit.
You have to search all over again the last place you visit, and visit it again.
This is something that makes using the editor a lot more painful.
Many times you want to go back and forth between prefabs or assets, and you can’t do that in Unity.
In addition to that, you cannot open two separate inspectors, or two separate prefabs at the same time.
This makes comparing prefabs or assets very painful.
Is there ever going to be something done in that regard?
I kind of feel you on the “go forward”/“go back” front, but considering this is a highly extensible engine, and there is so much going on if you take into account all the ways custom tools (editor windows, user-code reacting to editor-selection callbacks, code that might even execute when you open a prefab) can mess with your data, i also see how this could easily backfire in many ways.
Consider that changing the view to the “last view” is not always possible. Sometimes you are in a particular view, only in the context of editing something. So going back to that “view” wouldnt make sense, if that edition is not rolled backed (Undo). But then you are mixing “navigation” and “undo”. And that is also a dangerous mix. So i dont think is as viable as it appears to be, and would raise many edge cases that cant be easily handled.
About opening prefabs, i kind of also would like something like this. Currently you can only open “nested” prefabs while keeping your “navigation” toggle so you know at which depth you are, and you can go back to the previous depth.
But yes you cannot open multiple prefabs at the same time if not nested (consider that this could also be tricky, as you could end up opening the same “prefab” in 2 windows, one through the prefab itself, and another through a nested instance inside another prefab, then each other’s modifications would override one another / or they would need to be kept in sync which can also be problematic)
On the inspector front you are covered, you can open as many Inspectors / Hierarchy / SceneView / ProjectFolders as you want. And even lock each one of them independently so it doesnt change when you click something else (right click on the tab of any window).
you can open multiple Inspector windows by clicking on the three dots then selecting the Add Tab option.
to have separate properties displayed for different assets you select the asset you want to keep visible and then you click on the lock icon that is on the side of the three dots.
if you have a second inspector window unlocked that one will show the properties for whatever you have selected in that moment while the locked one will keep displaying the properties of the object that was selected when you have locked the window
