Sometimes there are occasions where I need multiple inspectors open to compare items or analyze an item while keeping my place viewing another item that I’m editing. On the top right of each docked pane of Unity, there is a hamburger icon.
In the Add Tab section, there is the option for another Inspector. This option will open another Inspector pane.
For the record, any tab option can be selected to open multiple of the selected pane type. While a typical workflow involves only needing one tab, there are occasions where having multiple is useful.
This opens up another Inspect. It will typically be notebook-tabbed behind the original. In the screenshot below, I’ve docked it side-by-side with the original inspector. Now, when you select something, they will both inspect the selected item. It is helpful if you want to view two different parts of the inspector at once (if they required vertical scrolling to different regions) but not useful otherwise.
Instead, we can hit the lock button near the hamburger icon for the current thing we have selected. This will make it so the thing the inspector is focused on will not change, even if we select something else.
So now we have one inspector locked to the thing selected when we toggled on the lock button – and another inspector tab that’s unlocked and will still change to whatever we change our selection to.
Directly above illustrates having the DeleteButton GameObject being viewed in the locked inspector to the right. On the left is a ScriptableObject asset being viewed by being selected from the Project pane.
For example, if I wanted to find a sprite that the DropMenu asset was referencing, then analyze that sprite to verify it. Then, set it as the sprite for DeleteButton with multiple inspectors. I wouldn’t have to find and inspect the DeleteButton GameObject again. This is a simple and contrived example, but for more complex things that may require multiple assets needing to be set in an object, it’s effective not having to repeatedly ping-pong back to the inspector pane for it.
This article and screenshots were made referencing Unity 2018.3.8f1.
– Stay strong, code on. William Leu
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