Editor's Camera Clipping Plane

I posted a similar question sometime ago:

http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/118735/near-plane-adjustment-in-scene-view.html

and Joshua suggested me to press F to focus the object I was interested in, since the editor would adjust the planes automatically.

It works, but I still claim to the Unity team to give us some kind of control - my suggestion is something like mouse wheel plus Ctrl or Alt etc. to adjust not only the near plane, but also the right button pivot.

Since this is the top google result for this question, it seems worth updating with a modern answer:

As of 2019.1, the scene view panel's toolbar offers a menu for configuring the editor camera.

The button:

The menu:

Previously you could fiddle with the camera zoom to adjust the scene view camera's near plane, but this actually no longer works with the Dynamic Clipping feature, which is enabled by default and clips scene view content at the same distance from the camera no matter how you've zoomed it. Disable this feature to enable editing of the Clipping Planes fields. The default Near value of 0.03 is very small, you likely won't need to change it.

For more information see the official scene view Camera documentation (2019.1)

Distance from object is important, but if you're working with terrains, the center of the terrain is far away.

Try (alt + center click) until you see the screen pan to your clicked point, then you can rotate around that spot with less clip.

The editor clipping plane can be a pain, definitely. I find that using "f" to zoom onto an object and then using ALT-RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON and moving the mouse is a better zooming solution than the mouse wheel once you've focused on the object. Using the mouse wheel tends to bring the clipping right back, but using ALT-RMB seems to be a smoother zoom.

If you select something that has "mesh data" associated with it you'll get far better results when using Fit. Selecting empty objects nearly always fails to focus in on just the bounding box of my selection. Someone could probably write a "Better Fit" script by iterating sub-items of the currently selected item to get a pseudo-box; that guy ain't me though.