Creating custom inspectors in Godot C# more easily

We found ourselves a bit frustrated (and surprised) when discovering how much it takes hooking up custom inspectors or drawers in Godot, at least in C# (where you have to also recompile everything). So we fixed it. And it's publicly available on GitHub!

What's the deal

The issue

The Godot way of doing things forces you to create a plugin anytime you want to customize the Editor, since letting it know that a custom inspector, dock or drawer exists is only available through methods of the EditorPlugin class. That single class is the only official registration point for all custom editor extensions in Godot 4.

It is a tedious process that forces you to either create a custom EditorPlugin for each "group" of classes that work together (so that if one breaks, other groups are still intact in the editor), or have one big giant class where you have to manually add all your custom inspectors etc. one after another. In a medium-sized project you could easily end up with 10+ manual registrations in a single file, making it a chore to maintain.

The solution

No more endless wrappers! You can now inherit from specific classes (like "CustomInspectorBase") and our addon will take care of scanning them automatically and customize the editor accordingly.

One plugin that automatically detects Inspectors and lets Godot know about it. No extra dependencies (simply delete the Inspector class and it's removed from anywhere, or create it and it's added automatically).

Installing the plugin

To download and install the plugin:

1. Clone our repository (or just download the zip files)
2. Copy the addons folder directly into your Godot project.
3. ⚠️ Remember to build your project (or Godot still wouldn't be able to know about the addon)
4. Enable the plugin in Project -> Project Settings -> Plugins -> Editor Utils.

Hooking up your first custom inspector

Attributes

After this.. you're set! As an example, let's say we want a "ReadOnly" attribute that shows the value in the Editor, but is not modifiable.

We can declare it in a Node like this:

public class ReadOnlyAttribute : Attribute{ }

[Tool]
public partial class ExampleNode : Node
{
    [Export] int thisIsAnInt;
    [Export] bool thisIsABoolean;
    [Export, ReadOnly] float thisIsAFloat;
}

And the actual implementation becomes:

using System;
using Godot;
using Febucci.EditorUtils;

#if TOOLS
public partial class ReadOnlyDrawer : AttributeDrawerBase<ReadOnlyAttribute>
{
    protected override Control GetPropertyEditor(Variant.Type type, string name, PropertyHint hintType, string hintString, PropertyUsageFlags usageFlags, bool wide, object value)
    {
        return new Label() { Text = $"{name}: {value.ToString() ?? "null"}" };
    }
}
#endif

Node inspectors

You can go further and modify the entire inspector of a Node. The process is similar: inherit from "CustomInspectorBase<YOURNODE>" and you can start customizing the Inspector right away. This is useful for things like organizing properties into groups, adding custom buttons, or hiding fields based on other values, all without touching the node's source code.

Frequently asked questions

Does this addon work with GDScript?

Not yet - it currently requires C#. GDScript support would likely need a C++ extension to scan classes at edit time.

Do I need to rebuild the project every time I add a new inspector?

Yes, once when you first add the class. After that the addon detects it automatically without extra registration steps.

Is this compatible with Godot 4.x?

It was written and tested on Godot 4.4. Older or newer 4.x versions should work but are not officially tested yet.

Can I use this in a commercial project?

Yes, it is MIT licensed, so there are no restrictions on commercial use.

In conclusion

Have fun! The system can be expanded with more hooks and similar (for example auto-adding scenes to the Inspector Dock) so we'll keep you updated once we're able to do so. You find everything in the repository. It's MIT licensed, meaning 0 restrictions on commercial use, and works on Godot 4.4 (tested).

Thank you so much for reading and see you on the next post!