Suggestion: Less wasted UI space

Feature requests
#1

The UI in defold is beautiful and clean but the more I use it the more cramped it begins to feel. The properties window always feels cramped so much so that numbers get cut off. Yet it doesn’t have to be like this if some of the padding was reduced.

Defold UI has a lot of unnecessary padding both horizontally and vertically. I calculated some of the padding on the attached image in red.

Using a 1080p monitor on windows 10.

Horizontal wasted space is around 58px or 3%. 18px of padding either side of the middle window is way too much.

Vertical wasted space is around 114px or 11%. Search in console is permanently shown and takes a massive 59px. I know you can minimise the console window. The footer for most of the time unless building a project is useless and just wastes 34px vertically. This information could easily be moved and the footer removed.

uiwastedspace
uiwastedspace.png1920×1050 121 KB

2 Likes
#2

Thank you for the feedback. We will start little by little to improve the editor UI, starting with dialogs and then slowly working around the entire application.

Personally I value that it feels quite spacious and not so cramped and cluttered. But as you point out there might be things we could change without it feeling to compact.

PS We will add support for maximizing a panel and this might help in certain cases to free up screen space while working.

5 Likes
#3

This will be a huge boon to smaller screens!

#4

Of course it depends on the screen used, but I agree with @britzl that I don’t like it too cramped :confused: Eventually resizing or hiding things should be optional.

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#5

I agree. Also, not cramping a user by default is generally just a good general UI design principle, but freedom of choice is always the golden road to follow.

1 Like
#6

Agreed. The spaced out UI layout looks much clean and better.

1 Like
#7

The 18 px space between panels is not actually padding, it’s the grab bar to resize the panels. They are pretty huge, but that’s both a blessing and a curse.

It would be nice if a style sheet for the editor was easily editable. That would solve a bunch of these on a individual user basis.

5 Likes
#8

I also enjoy the “spacious” feel of the editor, I’m not a big fan of too much content in a small space. What I AM a very big fan of, however, is using more than one monitor. To me disconnecting the code editor from the rest of the IDE would solve a lot of space issues. And possibly allow for showing a go/collection/GUI at the same time as the code. Boom!

3 Likes
#9

Definitely :smiley: +1