Overview of Action Map

This is article is going to explain what an Action Map is within Unity’s new Input System.

hitting the space key changes camera views

An example of an action map

By default, Unity doesn’t save edits you make in the Action Asset window when you save the Project. To save your changes, select Save Asset in the window’s toolbar. To discard your changes, close the window and choose Don’t Save when prompted. Alternatively, you can toggle auto-saving on by enabling the Auto-Save checkbox in the toolbar. This saves any changes to that Asset.

Note: This setting affects all .inputactions, Assets and persists across Unity Editor sessions.

The Action editor window is divided into three panes:

1. The left pane lists the Action Maps in the Asset. Each Action Map is a collection of Actions that you can enable or disable in bulk.
2. The middle pane contains the Actions in the currently selected Action Map, and the bindings associated with each Action.
3. The right pane contains the properties of the currently selected Action or Binding.

Use the following keyboard shortcuts to quickly trigger common operations:

Tip: You can search for Devices and/or Control Schemes directly from the search box. For example, “d:gamepad” filters for bindings to gamepad Devices, whereas “g:gamepad” filters for bindings in the “gamepad” Control Scheme. Matching is case-insensitive and matches any partial name.

Editing Action Maps

• To add a new Action Map, select the Add (+) icon in the header of the Action Map column.
• To rename an existing Action Map, either long-click the name, or right-click the Action Map and select Rename from the context menu. Note that Action Map names can’t contain slashes (/).
• To delete an existing Action Map, either right-click it and select Delete from the context menu, or use the Delete key (Windows) / ⌘⌫ (Mac).
• To duplicate an existing Action Map, either right-click it and select Duplicate from the context menu, or use Ctrl-D (Windows) / ⌘D (Mac).