Overall my experience working in the editor has been good but there are a number of usability annoyances I hope Epic will improve on at some point:
-Most apps that have a WASD fly mode include a modifier key to speed up the movement when pressed down, but UE4 doesn’t seem to. The shift key is commonly used, like in Unity for example. This is very helpful when moving around a big area.
-Many apps have a universal manipulator tool which combines the functions of the translate, rotate and scale tools into a single tool. This makes positioning objects much faster and easier than having to switch, switch, switch between three tools continuously. It would be great if UE4 had one.
-When you use “Set as Default” in the Editor Preferences you would think it would save your preferences permanently, but it only saves them for the current project. When you start a new project everything is set back to default and you have to reload your preferences. This is not the way I think most people would want or expect it to work.
-It would be highly desirable if we could customize the mouse button functions in the key config. The inconsistent way panning works in different parts of the editor is particularly frustrating and would be nice to be possible to fix.
-Some sort of user customizable pop-up pie menu or “Hotbox” style menu would be a nice thing.
-A zoom extents function would be handy. This is a hotkey many apps have which zooms out to see the full contents of the viewport.
-In orthographic views you can zoom to cursor, which is great, but it doesn’t work in perspective view. Could it be made to work in perspective also?
-In the views pulldown you can only select between three of the six standard orthographic views (top, bottom, front, back, left and right). While it might be possible to manage with just three, couldn’t you let us use all six? (On a nitpicky note “orthographic” is spelled wrong in the same menu.)
-Unity has several nice interaction features for which Unreal Editor seems to have no equivalent:
Lock View To Selected
Move To View
Align With View
Align View To Selected
You might think Snap View To Actor in UE4 is the same as Align View To Selected but they don’t work quite the same way. In UE4 it snaps you to the center of the object so you then have to immediately zoom back out each time to see it. It also does not recenter your view on the object snapped to like Unity does. The way Align View To Selected works in Unity is more desirable.
I believe that paying attention to these types of usability details makes a worthwhile improvement in the overall efficiency and feel of working in an app.
If there are solutions for any of these issues already available which I have missed please inform me.