Efficient Editor Layout in Unity

Professional Layout in Unity

Depending on what your needs are, you will alter the layout you’re leveraging in Unity at any given time. A lot of people make the mistake of trying to get used to the stock interface, only to have that swapped out from underneath them by various UX updates or trends of the day. Unity is no exception, and from the onset of its inception to now, the default and common layouts and interface have been modified. There have been also always been pundits prescribing the best type of view to leverage when you’re building the app. I agree with them in the sense that you should be very familiar with your tools, and you should learn how to navigate them as well as leverage the bits that increase your productivity or help you nail down the work that you are trying to complete. I agree with them that many professionals have been using the software for a long time, and their insights are very key in leveraging the tool to its full potential. I don’t think you can find one end-all, be-all layout to go with, but I’ve got a picture above of one of the better recommendations I’ve seen. And it’s focused on making it easy for you to get at all of the tools you need to be able to quickly access in order to develop efficiently.

The best benefit is that Unity lets you easily maneuver things every which way so you can shove things aside as you need, float them onto another desktop if that’s your thing, and persist the layouts you keep going back to, over and over. And it comes with some great ones by default. Rather than focusing on which specific layout is best for which situation, it’s probably better that you learn what each palette offers, and know when you want to use it, then figuring out where you want to put the useful thing. Here’s another one I leverage quite often:

Great for quickly applying scripts, materials and building user interfaces

I tend to swap to layouts I’ve built and now used often for specific scenarios I often find myself in. Of course I converted them into saved layouts because they were generally the same transitions to the interface I would make consistently, and specifically because I was getting ready to do something repetitive.

When I wanted a broader perspective, and the object hierarchy was less of a focus, I leveraged this layout

I’m going to try out the professional layout featured on this post for a while and see if I can stick with it instead of constantly altering my interface, but I have a feeling that’s a habit I won’t be giving up any time soon. I figure that because it’s something I also like about Visual Studio Code, being able to easily swap out the interface on an as-needed basis.