It’s been awhile since I’ve touched Unity. Coming back to it now, I would like to do away with the Atom Editor and use something a little more integrated. Knowing almost nothing about Visual Studio Suite, what is the benefits of using Visual Studio Community over Visual Studio Code?
The shortest possible answer is that Community is an IDE and Code is a text editor. VS Community has integration with Unity and version control systems, including MS’s own and Git.
Other than that, the experience of actually writing code on the two is virtually identical.
Since they’re both free, I’d recommend you try them both to see which one suits your needs. If you’re using version control a lot, you might prefer the integrated environment. Code is a little lighter on your system, though, and is very capable. I use Community, but only because it’s what my whole team uses (except the one guy on a Mac; he uses Code because Community isn’t yet available).
Before reading my novel below, here is the quick answer. Go with VS Code unless you have a very specific reason that you can’t.
VS Code is super light weight and fast. Takes only minute to install. Has debugging for Unity, git, code lens, themes, and extensions for just about everything could ever want. Gets updated constantly. VS Code is highly customization per project as well. Pretty much all of its settings can be edited in for User and or Project. Extensions can be enabled/disabled per project as well. This is useful for me because I have projects in PHP, NodeJS, C# etc. The default dark color seems just a little nicer than Visual Studio. It has some features I cannot live with out like Multi-Cursor/Keyboard editing which Visual Studio has but VS Code is nicer and more flexible once you master it. For years it use to be that I never wanted to use anything else than Visual Studio… That was until VS Code. I now mainly use VS Code and less often Visual Studio.
Visual Studio 2017 isn’t as heavy as the previous versions but is a lot more heavy than VS CODE. Can take a long time to install especially if you include extra packages such as C++. Loading times is more than VS Code but has improved greatly to previous versions of Visual Studio. Even with minimum for C# you are still in the multi Gigabytes while VS Code is less than 50 MB. Visual Studio is still amazing but I think VS Code is just a little more friendly to use.
I have noticed that VS Code doesn’t format my code exactly the way I want sometimes. It seems to not put tabs if i do an if() and not use { } for example. This could just be one of my extensions causing me the problem though.
The debugger is nicer in Visual Studio but VS Code debugger is still very nice and easy to use. Everything you need is in VS Code.
I have used both for a long time for many different projects/languages. I would say it comes down to mastery. Both are amazing if you master them. VS Code probably easier to master. While using Visual Studio I miss VS Code. While using VS Code I don’t really miss Visual Studio but sometimes rarely do miss resharpen extension :).