SkyUI is a mod that aims to improve Skyrim's user interface on the PC, by making it easier to use with mouse and keyboard, less wasteful of available screen space, and nicer to look at. We do all that while keeping true to the style of the original UI, so new and old components are integrated seamlessly.

The goal never was to re-create the complete interface from scratch, but instead to identify and focus on areas that need improvement, while leaving the things that are already good alone. This approach allowed us to push out incremental improvements as fast as possible.

Today, with version 5, SkyUI covers all core item menus and includes many other useful features, which are listed in the following.

The player inventory has been changed from the original two-list-layout to a single large panel:

• Icons to replace the text-based category list.
  
• Colored icons for each item type.
  
• Configurable text size, so more entries can be displayed at once.
  
• Extra columns to include additional item information. Examples are weight and value in general, and damage or armor rating for specific categories.
  
• Sortable columns to order items by a specific stat. Multi-state columns to quickly single out equipped, stolen, enchanted or poisoned items.
  
• Additional status icons to flag stolen, enchanted and poisoned items.
  
• Full-text search through the inventory.
  
• Intuitive and efficient keyboard navigation, as well as support for gamepads.
  
• Configurable Itemcard and 3D Item positions to support multi-monitor resolutions.
  
• Columns can be shown or hidden on-the-fly with the column list button next to the filter box.
  
• Button art is no longer static but matches the current control mapping.

The barter and container menus use a panel similar to the new player inventory, including all its features like sorting and text search:

• Two tabs to toggle between the player and vendor/container views.
  
• Carry weight is now displayed in the bottom bar when bartering.
  
• Tweaked menu controls for the container menu. No more accidental Take All when you wanted to Store.

The magic menu layout has been adapted to fit with the other new menus as well. The panel is now at the left side for a consistent look. Icons for each magic type make it easy to identify them in combined views, and new sorting options will prove especially useful for spellcasters:

• Organize spells by skill level, spell cost, duration or magnitude.
  
• Sort dragon shouts by level and recovery time.
  
• List active effects by source and remaining time.

The Mod Configuration Menu (MCM) for Skyrim is an in-game configuration panel for mods. The concept was adopted from the original MCM for Fallout: New Vegas.

For a lot of mod authors, allowing customization is important and they spend considerable time making their mods as configurable as they can. But so far, presenting these options to the player in a user-friendly way has been difficult.

The MCM addresses this problem and provides several advantages for both players and mod authors:

• A Mod Configuration option is accessible from the pause menu - there's no more need for immersion-breaking workarounds involving inventory items or spells.
  
• Options can be presented with proper UI elements (sliders, sub-menus, checkboxes, color-pickers, button icons etc.).
  
• Scalability - each mod menu can have up to 128 sub-pages, each containing up to 128 options.
  
• Localization capabilities for all languages that are supported by the game.
  
• A simple, yet flexible API, extensive documentation and examples to enable easy and rapid development.
  
• Usable with mouse, keyboard and gamepad.

If you are a mod author interested in using MCM, have a look at the documentation. It will always remain a part of the free SkyUI version and there are never going to be features exclusive to the paid version.

Finding certain locations on the map by name can be a tedious task, especially as the number of map markers increases. We addressed this problem by adding a search dialog to the map menu:

• Filter the list of discovered locations for relevant entries in a matter of seconds.
  
• The target destination is highlighted and automatically centered on the map.
  
• Mod added map markers as well as custom worldspaces are supported by default.

Instead of having to constantly open the magic menu, active magic effects can now be displayed directly in the HUD.

For effects that manipulate actor values, emblems are used to show the type of change.
For temporal effects, a timer bar indicates the duration.

All magic effect types the game includes are supported. This extends to mod added content as well. To support individual user preferences, the following properties are configurable:

• Icon size;
  
• Alignment and orientation;
  
• Manual position adjustment;
  
• Minimum duration threshold.

Note that the active effects HUD is an optional feature. It can be disabled in the SkyUI configuration menu.

The new favorites menu is still keeping true to the original concept - a fast, non-intrusive way to access your essential items.

To improve it, we made several additions and changes:

• Three extra categories to filter out gear (weapons + armor), aid (potions + ingredients) and magic (spells + shouts).
  
• A compact item list with more space and improved hotkey indicators.
  
• Item icons as known from the inventory.

Another main feature of the new the favortites menu are 8 customizable item groups.These groups are accessed via a slot bar at the bottom of the favorites list and managed directly in the menu. What makes them useful beyond enabling extended categorization is the "Group Use" command.
This processes each item in a group depending on its type:

• Armor, clothing and accessoires are put on.
  
• Potions are consumed and poisons are applied to the current weapon.
  
• Weapons, shields and spells are equipped, with full support for dual wield combinations.

A group use can also be triggered with configurable hotkeys from outside the menu.User-enchanted (if uniquely named) and tempered items are supported.