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UXML Preview for Unity UI Toolkit

UXML Preview for Unity UI Toolkit

reuhomi

|
1 install
| (0) | Free
Render Unity UI Toolkit UXML/USS inside VS Code, without opening the Unity Editor.
Installation
Launch VS Code Quick Open (Ctrl+P), paste the following command, and press enter.
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UXML Preview for Unity UI Toolkit

Render Unity UI Toolkit .uxml documents inside VS Code without opening the Unity Editor. Layout is calculated by uxml-preview with Yoga, the layout engine used by UI Toolkit. This extension reads and watches files, hosts the preview, and shows what the core renderer produced.

What it renders — and what it does not

The renderer supports VisualElement, Label, Button, Image, and ScrollView. Other controls are replaced by plain boxes and reported in the diagnostics panel; unsupported content is not silently hidden.

Template and Instance are not rendered yet. This is a common limitation in real UI Toolkit documents, where reusable UI is often composed from templates.

This scope was checked against 14 UXML documents from six external open-source projects. The sample produced 131 unsupported-control diagnostics. That is not 131 separate rendering failures: it is another way of seeing that only the five control types above are currently supported. The sources, licences, and file-by-file observations are in the external sample findings.

This extension:

  • is a viewer and never edits your files;
  • does not validate USS; syntax and validation belong to existing language extensions;
  • does not promise to reproduce every UI Toolkit control or visual property.

Known limitations

The core renderer publishes three known differences from Unity:

  • Browser font metrics differ from Unity font assets, so text-dependent layout can move by a few pixels.
  • Unity's rule for the height of a container whose children wrap has not been identified, so that height can differ.
  • A percentage on the main axis under a parent without a definite size can resolve differently because the Yoga version used by Unity 6000.0.40f1 and the Yoga version used by the renderer behave differently.

Two path cases found in external projects are also unresolved:

  • Relative @import cannot be based on the importing stylesheet until the core tells the resolver which stylesheet requested it (uxml-preview#1).
  • Asset URLs in inline style attributes can reach the resolver with XML entities still encoded (uxml-preview#2).

Packages are resolved only from <projectRoot>/Packages; Unity's Library/PackageCache is not searched.

Measured layout values

Against Unity 6000.0.40f1, 548 of 564 compared layout values matched. The 564 values are x, y, width, and height for 141 elements. This measures Yoga's layout coordinates for that case set, not control coverage or the full painted image. See the core's accuracy document for the cases, environment, tolerance, and exclusions.

Open a preview

For a concept-first walkthrough, open the self-contained user manual in a browser.

With a .uxml file selected:

  1. Press Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows/Linux or Cmd+Shift+V on macOS.
  2. Use the preview icon in the editor title bar.
  3. Right-click the file in Explorer and choose UXML Preview: Open Preview to the Side.

Saving the UXML document or a resolved imported stylesheet refreshes the preview. The canvas starts at a fixed 1920×1080 so the same document lays out at the same size for different readers; Fit to panel is available when a responsive preview is wanted.

The control bar can apply hover, active, focus, and disabled to every element at once. The active states and the canvas size remain visible beside the preview in the control bar.

Settings

uxmlPreview.projectRoot is the Unity project directory containing Assets, Packages, and ProjectSettings. It is used for project:// paths, /Assets paths, package paths, and GUID fallback after a written asset path has gone stale. Set it when the workspace folder containing the UXML file is not the Unity project root. When it is empty, that workspace folder is used.

Setting Default Purpose
uxmlPreview.canvas.width 1920 Fixed root width in pixels.
uxmlPreview.canvas.height 1080 Fixed root height in pixels.
uxmlPreview.canvas.fitToPanel false Use the available preview area instead of the fixed size.
uxmlPreview.projectRoot empty Resolve Unity project paths and GUID references.
uxmlPreview.states {} Pseudo-class states keyed by USS selector; there is no selector UI in this version.

Unity and UI Toolkit are trademarks of Unity Technologies. This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by Unity Technologies.

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