Unreal Engine’s default interface is powerful, but it's chonky. If you’re working on a laptop or a single monitor, the menus and padding eat up the space you need to actually see your level.
CompactUE is a straightforward utility that reorganizes and shrinks the editor UI. It moves bulky elements out of the way and tightens up the layout so you can stop squinting at a tiny viewport and can work more comfortably. Every pixel matters.
Key Features
Slim Menus: This tool collapses the thick top menu bar into a smaller version of the UE5 logo and puts the tabs at the same vertical level to recover some space.
Tight Padding: Reduces the "empty space" in the menu, tabs and toolbar, so the interface feels more compact and modern.
Hide Labels: Some items on the toolbar are distinguishable by their icons, so having a label is unnecessary. By hiding the labels you gain space to put more tools on the toolbar.
Status Bar: Collapse the status bar and copy their items to the toolbar, so you recover some more vertical space from under the viewport.
Remove viewport margins: The viewport is the main gate into your game, by removing it's margins you get more space to interact with your game.
Safe & Lightweight: No engine files are modified. It’s a clean C++ plugin that you can enable or disable instantly without breaking your project.
Toggle with one click: In case you need to show Unreal Engine to someone else and need to have the default interface, you can quickly return to the default interface with the button on the toolbar.
@MarcusBuer Hey, generally I love this tool but I’ve noticed a weird bug. As soon as I enable the plugin I can’t pilot my actors any longer, specifically my lights. You can try it yourself on your side? Any idea what could cause this?
I noticed a while ago having a bunch of panels in unreal (Details, outliner, etc..) causes some performance issues and by hitting f10 or f11 and going to a ‘less editor visible, more game visible’ causes my performance to go up.
I’d imagine since this reduces the number of UMG/Slate elements It’d do the same.
Have you ever compared how much this might actually improve general editor performance?
I’d imagine it must at least a little bit.
Yes, using it in F11 (full screen) it gets more performance. It is probably a mix of having less things on screen and windows applying some optimizations for fullscreen windows.
With F10/Z (toggle sidepanels) there is also a bit of improvement, on an empty scene that I get about 165FPS, if I toggle the sidepanels to the side it gets to around 200FPS, and if I hide and put on fullscreen it gets a bit more.
There are some functions that run periodically to keep the state fresh, but I’ve made sure that it runs on a timer instead of every frame, and kept it reasonably simple, so it shouldn’t bring the performance down.
Of course, if you have a scene populated instead of a blank scene the difference gets a lot smaller.