World of Warcraft Forever: How to Change Your HUD Layout and Interface

Almost every piece of the World of Warcraft interface can be picked up and dropped somewhere else without a single addon. The tool that does it is Edit Mode, the built-in HUD editor that turns your screen into a snapping grid and gives each element its own settings panel. Player frame too far from the center of your screen? Gryphons eating space next to your action bars? All of that is a few clicks away.

Quick answer: Press Escape, choose Edit Mode, then drag any HUD element to a new spot on the grid. Click an element to open its options, then hit Save.

Open Edit Mode and move HUD elements

Press Escape to bring up the Game Menu and select Edit Mode. The world dims slightly, a grid appears over your screen, and every movable interface element gets an outline. You can also right-click your character portrait and pick Edit Mode from there.

Accessing HUD Edit Mode — Edit Mode overlays a grid on the screen and outlines every element you can move. Shown at 00:21 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Press and hold on any outlined element, then drag it to your preferred location. As you move a frame, it snaps to the grid, keeping the player frame, target frame, cast bar, experience bar, minimap, and action bars neatly aligned. A typical layout places the player frame nearer the screen center, the target frame across from it, and the cast bar in the space between them.

Single-click an element instead of dragging it to open its own options panel. Each one carries its own settings, so action bars expose icon size and row count, unit frames expose sizing, and so on. Adjust, then move to the next element.

Click Save when the screen looks right. Nothing is written until you save, so exiting without it drops your work.

Remove the gryphons and action bar art

The decorative gryphons (or wyverns, for Horde characters) sitting beside the main action bar are separate elements called End Cap (Left) and End Cap (Right). Inside Edit Mode, click one of them and tick the Hidden checkbox in its options panel. Repeat for the other side and save. The bar keeps working; only the art goes away.

Customizing End Caps — Selecting End Cap (Right) and checking Hidden removes the gryphon art from that side of the action bar. Shown at 00:40 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Action bars have their own art toggle as well. Select Action Bar 1 in Edit Mode and use the Hide Bar Art option to strip the frame around the buttons for a flatter, more minimal look closer to what custom interfaces like ElvUI produce.

Advanced Options: Frames, combat bars, and vehicle UI

Re-enter Edit Mode and open Advanced Options to reveal elements that normally only appear in specific situations. The toggles are grouped so you can pull a hidden frame onto the grid, position it, and know it will land in the right place the moment it becomes active in combat or in a vehicle.

Frames — unit frames and related panels
Combat — combat bars and related indicators
Vehicle UI — the bar that replaces your abilities while in a vehicle
Misc — the remaining odds and ends

Advanced Options and Settings — Advanced Options exposes Frames, Combat, and Misc toggles for elements that are normally hidden. Shown at 00:56 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Several settings that used to live in the Raid Profile page now sit inside Edit Mode rather than the Options menu, so check here first if a toggle seems to have vanished.

The Layout dropdown at the top of Edit Mode holds your saved layouts alongside two built-in ones, Modern (Preset) and Classic (Preset). Switching between them instantly reshuffles the HUD, which makes them useful starting points before you start dragging things around. You can name, save, copy, and delete your own layouts from the same menu.

Control	What it does
Layout dropdown	Switches between presets and saved layouts
Import Layout	Pastes in a layout string from elsewhere
Share	Copies your layout string to the clipboard
Save	Commits your current changes

Click Share, and the game copies a text string representing the whole layout to your clipboard, ready to paste into Discord or a forum post. Going the other way, Import Layout takes a string someone else gives you and rebuilds their setup on your screen. Save afterwards to keep it.

Layout Presets and Management — The Layout dropdown holds Modern and Classic presets, with Import Layout for strings shared by other players. Shown at 01:10 in PazarGamingGuides’s video. Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Layouts are also tied to specialization. If you swap between specs regularly, the interface remembers which layout belongs to which spec and switches for you.

Confirm the layout saved and reset it if needed

You know the change took when you exit Edit Mode and the grid disappears with your frames still in their new positions, and the layout name you saved stays selected in the dropdown the next time you open the editor. Hidden elements such as the end caps simply stop drawing on screen.

When the interface stops behaving — frames refusing to move, panels overlapping, elements that will not respond — the first thing to do is disable your addons, then reset your WoW User Interface from Blizzard’s support flow. Customer support does not help build custom interfaces or troubleshoot addons, so anything beyond a reset is a question for the UI and Macro forums.

One limitation worth knowing before you start: Edit Mode cannot bring back the original pre-revamp interface. The modern HUD is the baseline now, and your choices are the Modern and Classic presets plus whatever you build on top of them. Addons remain fully supported for anything the built-in editor does not cover, including Classic-styled skins that hook into Edit Mode and add their own checkboxes to the same panels you have been clicking through.