Introduction to editor development

    • The design decisions behind the Godot editor.

    • How to work efficiently on the Godot editor’s C++ code.

    This guide is aimed at current or future engine contributors. To create editor plugins in GDScript, see Making plugins instead.

    See also

    If you are new to Godot, we recommended you to read before continuing. Since the Godot editor is a Godot project written in C++, much of the engine’s philosophy applies to the editor.

    The Godot editor is drawn using Godot’s renderer and . It does not rely on a toolkit such as GTK or Qt. This is similar in spirit to software like Blender. While using toolkits makes it easier to achieve a “native” appearance, they are also quite heavy and their licensing is not compatible with Godot’s.

    The editor’s code is fully self-contained in the folder of the Godot source repository.

    Some editor functionality is also implemented via modules. Some of these are only enabled in editor builds to decrease the binary size of export templates. See the folder in the Godot source repository.

    Some important files in the editor are:

    • editor/editor_node.cpp: Main editor initialization file. Effectively the “main scene” of the editor.

    • : The 2D editor viewport and related functionality (toolbar at the top, editing modes, overlaid helpers/panels, …).

    • editor/spatial_editor_gizmos.cpp: Where the 3D editor gizmos are defined and drawn. This file doesn’t have a 2D counterpart as 2D gizmos are drawn by the nodes themselves.

    When working on an editor feature, you may have to modify files in Godot’s GUI nodes, which you can find in the scene/ folder.

    One rule to keep in mind is that you must not introduce new dependencies to editor/ includes in other folders such as scene/. This applies even if you use #ifdef TOOLS_ENABLED.

    To make the codebase easier to follow and more self-contained, the allowed dependency order is:

    This means that files in editor/ can depend on includes from scene/, , and core/. But, for example, while scene/ can depend on includes from servers/ and core/, it cannot depend on includes from editor/.

    Currently, there are some dependencies to includes in scene/ files, but they are in the process of being removed.