Adventures in IDE Land

I contemplated putting this in one of the 20 MonoDevelop topics, but I’m more or less faced with a lot of issues on just about anything I’m plugging into Unity for scripting. So really, I could use just about anything that would work.

The gyst is that I’ve been trying to get any IDE to work as they should with Unity 2017.3 and they do very much not work. My main two candidates for “please let me do my work” editors are MonoDevelop and VSCode. I’m fine with either, but both have been problematic.

My preference would be to keep using MonoDevelop, as it’s simple, clean, and got the job done for me. But I’m pretty sure I did something so horrible that MonoDevelop won’t even speak to me now. I followed the various guides and workarounds that have been posted across multiple topics here to no avail each time. The initial problem I had was the classic “open one script and Unity keeps opening MonoDevelop” which ultimately degenerated into “MonoDevelop doesn’t open at all as a program anywhere” after going with some repo somewhere with it. Yes, I installed mono-complete and all that stuff. No, I have no idea what to do now.

VSCode opens the solution and anything I open in the editor fine, but lacks any form of autocomplete or intellisense outside of type names. C# and some Unity extensions are on, and it seems to load the solution just fine until it starts complaining about CLI. I’ve installed CLI in a previous attempt to use VSCode on Linux and having seen it has done absolutely nothing to fix this reoccuring issue, I find it’s not worth wasting my time downloading a dev tool, registering an account to it, and disabling its telementary. I don’t know if it’s related to that, since before it’s failed to do anything, but I typically got this warning when trying to load this solution:

Background: I recently just installed Linux Mint 18.3 XFCE, coming from 18.2 KDE and having been using Unity Linux for a long while now on different levels of Mint. I say this because I want to assure that I’m aware this is all beta stuff and that it’s a really appreciateable effort to have a native Linux build at all. I’m pretty happy that I get to work on my preferred OS at the capacity this currently supports. This should be established so my complete and utter frustration over this issue isn’t seen as just tearing down and trivializing what all the Linux team is doing. With that out of the way, I’m not very remorseful on setting fire to some really obnoxious issues that has so far costed me two days in productivity (and it will get worse if I don’t just go ask for direction here and now) because of 2017.3’s lack of baseline support for an IDE.

Concludings: Pardon that this probably sounds really complainy. I was gaining a lot of progress across the last week or so, and this problem smashed me into a brick wall where I have not been able to accomplish anything. It is very, very frustrating and I will probably have to drag all my stuff to Windows until someone here can give me some kind of guidance to help fix this disaster.

If you don’t mind paying the money, I use Jetbrain’s Rider on Linux. It’s pretty good if you’re looking for an IDE. I’ve never used Visual Studio with Resharper, so I can’t comment on how it compares to that, but it’s pretty solid to be honest. I used to use vim on OSX for like 4 years and it was my pseudo IDE (along with the command line), so I’m using IdeaVim. It’s not the same but at` least I’m not pulling my hair.

I rebooted my computer today and was notified of an apparent upgrade to Mono by the Update Manager. Taking that apparently just magically fixed everything about MonoDevelop and then some. Weird considering I had been update+upgrade apt-getting for mono and stuff yesterday when having problems. Infuriating, but everything works now so I’m best off just going back to work and not touching anything held together with scotch tape. Unfortunately aside from that, I can’t really explain pretty much anything that was going on, so now this topic is probably just dead weight.

I found much of the IDEs I was trying in general weren’t working which lead me to think it was a Mono/C# issue on my system, rather than a specific issue with specific IDEs. Vim is delicious, though. Considering things stabilized after some apparent upgrade, stacking more IDEs wouldn’t have done much. The only weird thing was that VSCode and MonoDevelop were both broken but in different ways, but now that they work I can’t bring myself to care. It’s nice to be home again.

Another cross platform alternative is “Consulo”, a free version based on intelliJ and therefore similar to Rider. The unity integrations are actually better than the ones provided by Rider at this point.

Here is the link: