A collection of user experience improvements to the Unreal Engine source code, designed to enhance the editor interface and workflow for contributors and developers.
This project addresses key usability challenges in the Unreal Engine 5 editor. These improvements provide a more intuitive and efficient development experience, with a focus on modern user interface standards and developer ergonomics.
Unreal Engine 5 is a powerful tool, but certain aspects of the editor interface can be optimized for better usability. This project implements targeted improvements to address common friction points and enhance the overall development workflow.
For a detailed list of all modifications, see the comparison with the original engine.
- Improved Color Scheme: Refined editor color palette for better visual hierarchy and reduced eye strain
- Enhanced Alignment: Optimized UI element positioning, particularly in search input fields
- Typography Improvements: Increased use of monospace fonts for code-related content and improved readability
This feature brings IDE-like autocomplete experience to the Blueprint action menus, inspired by modern development tools such as VS Code. It significantly improves action discovery and selection efficiency through:
- Fuzzy Matching: Advanced pattern matching algorithm that gracefully handles incomplete or misspelled queries
- Multipart Match Highlighting: Visual highlighting of matched characters across multiple words
- Word Boundary Awareness: Intelligent matching that respects word boundaries for more relevant results
- Backward Compatibility: Gracefully falls back to the original exact-match algorithm when fuzzy matches are unavailable
| Query | Matched Text |
|---|---|
AdCuEv |
Add Custom Event |
aev |
Add Custom Event |
ge ac loc |
Get Actor Location |
The redesigned Action Palette provides a modern, intuitive interface:
By default, Unreal Engine 5 scrolls incrementally through interface lists, which can impede navigation through lengthy content. This improvement increases the scrolling velocity to 4 lines per scroll event, providing a more responsive and efficient browsing experience for UI panels and lists.
Note: This setting applies exclusively to UI panel and list scrolling. Mouse wheel zoom behavior remains unchanged.
Brings back the default Windows behavior. By default, Unreal Engine 5 creates new editor windows as Win32 owned windows of their parent. This causes them to always stay on top of the main window — making it impossible to bring the main window to the foreground, even when explicitly requested.
This improvement restores natural, user-controlled window stacking behavior:
- Bring any window to front: Click on any window or use the taskbar to bring it to the foreground — the other windows no longer forcibly stay on top of it
- Correct mouse input routing: Mouse events (clicks, hover, scroll) are always delivered to the visually front window, not the one that happens to be behind it
- Popups and tooltips unaffected: Popup menus, tooltips, and cursor decorators continue to float above their parent windows as expected
This project has plans for the following enhancements:
- Configuration interface for customizable settings
- Enhanced action scoring based on usage heuristics
- Performance optimization through action result caching
- Advanced tooltip system with image and Markdown support
- Improved color picker interface
- Additional UI refinements
- Support for multiple Unreal Engine 5 versions
- Plugin architecture for community contributions
This patch is compiled for Unreal Engine 5.7.3 and is not compatible with other versions.
To access the full source code / patch you must join Epic Games organization first. Watch quick video tutorial how to do it.
To use these improvements, you need to replace the original engine files with the modified versions:
- Download the latest Patch.zip
- Close Unreal Engine application if it's running
- Extract the patch contents into
~\UnrealEngine\Engine\Binaries\Win64
Warning: Create a backup of your engine files before replacing them.
Alternatively, clone the fork repository and build the project from source.