good editor?

Hello everyone my team and I are new to unity. We have nearly everything planned out but we would like to know what is the best editor to use and why. It has to be free as we are a high school team. I heard mono develop isn’t that good but that may have been a while back. Any advice would be a great help.

We are using C# BTW

You got pretty much two choice… Mono or Visual Studio. Both comes in some free version.

Mono is a pretty nice IDE. If I had to choose that or the Visual Studio Express edition which doesn’t properly work with Unity3d (You can’t set it as your default from what I’ve read) I would definitely choose Mono.

However I have VS2012 Professional so I use that.

If you want to use the visual studio express edition you have to open the sollution file yourself. Not a big deal for me, I got tired of the slow intellisense of monodevelop and haven’t looked back since.

What are you talking about? I got VS Express and I can open solution directly from Unity just fine.

Bits of it work fine. Other bits don’t work at all. It opens, but it doesn’t do anything by way of integration.

There’s another guy who wrote and shared a utility to better integrate VS Express. It’s not perfect, but it goes 80% of the way. If you do a search on the forums you should find it.

For what it’s worth, I’m currently using MonoDevelop (on a Mac) and it’s actually alright. I used it on Windows ~3 weeks ago and it was terrible, but the latest update claims to have fixed the stuff that drove me up the wall.

Visual Studio’s only substantive lack of integration is you don’t get popped immediately to line numbers by double clicking on errors in the unity IDE.

You can turn on the line number display in the visual studio settings and/or use Cntrl-G: line number to make this a very small downside.

I find that the lack of infuriating pauses and syntax highlighting screw ups allows me to work twice as fast despite this downside Mono literally can’t keep up with typing sometimes and that is unacceptable. I’d use notepad sooner.