I’ve had a minor annoyance over the last year working on my Unity project: the screen canvas is visible in the Unity Editor scene view, and intercepts any clicks within the scene view that cross over the canvas. I finally decided to see if there is a way to remove it from the scene view without removing it from the scene altogether.

It turns out the solution is rather simple. Unity has two ways to hide objects from the scene view:

Disable the Gizmo

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Individual component’s gizmos can be disabled from the Scene view by clicking the Gizmos dropdown in the top right corner. This didn’t really solve my problem though since there are other elements on the GameObjects than just the Canvas itself, and the UI elements such as text labels and buttons are still visible.

Hide the entire Layer

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This is the feature I was looking for! In the top-right corner of the Unity Editor itself is a Layers dropdown box. Individual layers can be hidden entirely from the scene view.

Now the UI doesn’t block and intercept my clicks in the scene view.

But one needs to keep in mind that now all items in the UI layer are invisible in the scene view, not just the screen canvas.