Intelligent “new (thing)” control for #unity3d

In Unity, hundreds of times a day you do “new (folder)” or “new (C# script)” etc. But Unity makes this ridiculously hard: you have to hunt and peck a tiny button and then hunt-peck a tiny item in a huge dropdown that is very easy to miss.

And you can’t do any of this from the keyboard. Even though you’re fully in keyboard mode and about to write the name of the New Thing (required!) and if it’s a script: type in the source code.

Screw that.

UPDATE: Now available in Asset Store – get the source

For a mere $2, I will Intelligent New you long time:

Source is included. If you want to see how I did it, knock yourselves out…

My context-sensitive New for Unity

So, what I’ve made today:

intelligent-new-demo-1

• Select any folder or object in the Project window
• Hit “shift-N” (because Unity sucks and steals Ctrl-N and refuses to let you choose a better one. Stupid stupid stupid.)
• A popup appears pre-filled with a sensible new file name OR folder name
  1. If you were on a folder, it prepares to auto-create a new folder
  2. If you were on a script file, it prepares to auto-create a new script
  3. The name is pre-selected and editable, exactly as with Unity built-in
• Sometimes that intelligent guess above will be wrong, so … hit Tab, and it switches type, while keeping the text selected and editable

Net result: super-fast workflow for creating new scripts and organizing your project.

(This required an ungodly amount of hacking and trial and error to work around bugs, bad documentation, and obvious missing core features from Unity APIs. But it works, and seems to be pretty seamless now)

Implementation Notes

A subset of the things I discovered / re-discovered on the journey to this one small fix / improvement:

1. AssetDatabase.CreateAsset is basically broken: can’t create C# scripts at all. Don’t try.
2. ScriptableWizard is unusable in Unity less than 5.0, because they made a core method private / non-overridable. Don’t bother.
3. You can find the Project window and others by doing a reflection on the Assembly to find the magic C# Type of known Unity private classes (that SHOULD BE public!) and comparing at runtime. Hoops? Jumping through? Because an API has something private that should have always been public? Welcome to Unity customization! :)
4. You can find the exact position of the selected row by adding yourself as a callback on Unity’s own row-by-row rendering of their built-in windows, and saving the data every frame. Sounds scary; works great (one of the few bits here that is a perfect hack with no downsides)
5. Popups need you to create a new class, and that class MUST BE in file of its own or you will break Unity (internal bugs in Unity window management that trigger when you reload/restart Unity)
6. …if you trigger that bug (or in any way end up with floating, non-closeable windows), go to the Layout menu and re-select the layout you’re already using. It will kill any unexpected windows. Phew!
7. Unity still hasn’t made the Indent width (in pixels) public. The documentation insults you by saying that when you hardcode the number 20 this will break your code in future. YES, WE KNOW. SO MAKE THE DAMN NUMBER PUBLIC, YOU BASTARDS.
8. There is a 2 pixel top and bottom padding needed to surround textfields in 1-line popups. I hardcoded this, it may have a number somewhere in the API. Good frickin’ luck trying to find it. Given the taunt about indents above, I very much doubt it is public.
9. If you have a button or non-editable textfield with a changeable title, or anything that can be changed by a keypress during rendering, it is critical that in OnGUI you read Event.current.type and switch() on it. As far as I can tell, this has never been documented except in forum threads and blog posts by Unity staff. Once you know about it, you can sort of guess it from reading the undocumented bits of the API, but it’s damn hard to find references to it online. (I found it years ago by trial and error and blind luck). Until you do this you get race conditions when changing GUI based on keypresses. Ugh.

   Compatibility

   Critically, this (should) work no matter how much I customized Unity elsewhere. It’s peeking into the actual window and render areas to decide what to popup and where on screen.

   The only conflict I expect is one that – thanks to some brainfart design at Unity corp – we can’t workaround: I had to hardcode “shift N” as the keyboard shortcut :(.

   Want it yourself?

   I thought it would take me about 10-20 minutes to do. HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH! If I’d done this as a client project, I worked out it cost almost $1500 in billable hours. Ugh.

   I’m going to use this in production for a while. If it continues not to break or corrupt anything, I’ll put it on the Asset Store.

   Next up…

   …I’m going to do some context-sensitive New for the Hierarchy window, I think. Now that I have these hacks working, that’ll be quite a lot easier.