Learning the Unity interface

When your Unity project loads, you’ll see a screen packed full of information. It’s perfectly normal to feel a little overwhelmed at first, but don’t worry — you’ll get comfortable with everything as you work through the first few chapters.

Note: This tutorial is part of a collection that teaches Unity development from the ground up. You can read the entire series over here. This series is free and does not require any account creation. All assets are provided. If you find it useful, feel free to buy me a coffee.

Your layout will probably look like this:

If not, click the Layout button in the top-right and select 2 by 3 from the dropdown menu in the upper right corner of the application.

Each layout is composed of several different views. A view is simply a panel of information that you use to manipulate the engine. For instance, there’s a view made for placing objects in your world. There’s another view for you to play the game.

Here’s what the interface looks like when broken down into individual views:

Each red rectangle outlines a view that has its own purpose, interface and ways that you interact with it. Throughout this tutorial series, you’ll learn about many of these views.

To see a list of all views, click the Window option on the menu bar.

As you can see, there are a lot of different views that do a lot of different things.

Customizing the editor

When working with Unity, you’ll typically want to rearrange views into a Layout that’s ideal for a given task. Unity allows you to save layouts for future use.

In the Editor, look for the Game tab (the view to the lower left) and right-click it. From the drop-down menu, select Add Tab then choose Profiler.

The Profiler view lets you analyze your game while it’s running. Unfortunately, the profiler is also blocking the Game view, so you won’t be able to play the game while you profile it — not so helpful.

Click and hold the Profiler tab and drag it to the Scene tab above.

As you see, views can be moved, docked and arranged. They can also exist outside the Editor as floating windows.

To save the layout, select Window\Layouts\Save Layout… and name it Debugging. Click the Save button.

Whenever you need to access this particular layout, you can select the Layout button and choose Debugging.

When clicked, you’ll see a listing of all your views. You’ll see your new Debugging layout included in the list.

You can also delete layouts. If you ever accidentally trash a stock layout, you can restore the default Unity layouts.

Where to go from here

The Unity interface can be a little overwhelming at first. Remember, the Unity interface is just a collection of views. Each view is used for a very specific task. It help to often limit your views so you don’t get overwhelmed by unneeded information.

The next step is to start using your views and you’ll start with the Project window in the next tutorial.