The Godot game editor comes with many settings you can change to improve your experience.
This guide will give you the settings we use in this course and recommend settings you can change to make the editor better fit your taste.
Some settings will only make sense after you complete some chapters. We grouped all settings in this guide, so you know where to find our recommendations. Please feel free to revisit this later.
To access the editor settings window, click Editor -> Editor Settings…
This window gives you access to the editor settings and the program’s shortcuts if you want to customize them.
Depending on your computer’s display, you might want to increase the font sizes used by the editor.
To change them, click the search bar, type font, and go to the Interface -> Editor section.
The Main Font Size setting controls most of the text you’ll see in the editor. To change the GDScript code’s font size, you have to change the Code Font Size setting.
We use a Main Font Size of 22 points and a
Code Font Size of 24 points in this course.
In the same section, you’ll find a Display Scale drop-down menu. To see it, please clear your search bar.
It should automatically detect your system settings and scale the editor accordingly.
For example, if you use a scale of 150% on
Windows, Godot should automatically use a scale of
150%.
But if it looks off, you can change the display scale using the drop-down menu. It will scale the font and everything else in the user interface.
In this course, we use the optional type hints in GDScript.
This is an optional feature of the language that helps you catch errors and learn faster.
You will learn more about type hints in the course, but you need to turn on that feature to get code that looks like our lessons.
In the Editor Settings window, click on the search bar and enter type hint.
In the Text Editor -> Completion section, turn on the Add Type Hints checkbox.
Godot comes with a built-in code reference which you can access by pressing F1.
The built-in help has its own font size settings.
To change them, you type help in the search bar and head to Text Editor -> Help. You want to change the Help Font Size and Help Source Font Size.
We use the same values as the editor and code font sizes:
24 and 22 points.
There are a couple of extra settings we recommend looking at as they can be useful. But those are optional.
Godot’s script editor comes with two code highlighting color themes you can pick from.
To change them, type theme in the search bar and open Text Editor -> Theme.
There, you can choose between two built-in color themes: Adaptive and Default.
This only changes the colors of code in the script editor. In this course, we use the default theme: Adaptive. Here are the two themes side-by-side.
You can also change the interface colors by going to Interface -> Theme.
We use the default dark blue theme, but note that there is also a light theme if you prefer bright tones. You can also change the other options to tweak the contrast and the editor’s main colors.
When writing code, the editor will test what you write periodically to check for errors. Also, it will provide suggestions as you type to help you write code faster.
You can control the delay before either of those two things happen.
Type completion in the search bar and open Text Editor -> Completion.
The editor will only check for errors when you stop typing. To make the editor check your code more often, you can lower the Idle Parse Delay.
If the default delay of 2 seconds feels slow to you, you
may consider lowering it. If you often pause to think and this feature
gets in the way, you can also increase the duration.
The Code Complete Delay setting controls how quickly the auto-completion menu appears as you type code. The default duration is a bit long.
If your computer can keep up, I recommend setting it to the minimum
of 0.01 seconds. That way, completion suggestions update
instantly as you type.
If your computer is very slow, you may want to experiment with this value. The lower the delay, the more calculations the computer has to do.
Godot’s built-in code editor comes with two line length indicators by default.
Those are guidelines to remind you not to write lines of code that are too long.
We try to keep the code under 80 or 100
characters in most programming languages.
In this course, we limit line length to 100 characters
and don’t need the secondary indicator.
To remove that secondary line, type appearance in the search
bar and in Text Editor -> Appearance, set the Line
Length Guideline Soft Column to 100.
Notice that we also turned on the Word Wrap setting to make long lines wrap. It ensures that the code is always visible on videos, even if the line is long.
Those are the common editor settings we recommend tweaking to improve your experience using Godot.