I’m a big fan of Resharper, and it does wonders for my coding productivity in Visual Studio, but this IDE is much more lightweight, and has all the latest Resharper features built in. It also has an extension for Unity (available as an option when you install it).
Its free while in early access, so check it out here… available for PC, Mac and Linux.
Tips :
I had to turn on a setting called Cyclic Expand Word to get suggestions automatically when typing a new word (instead of using CTRL+ENTER) to get things completed. So you might want to turn that on.
Learn as many keyboard shortcuts as you can, this is where this tool becomes really powerful
Also the CTRL+SHIFT+F window for finding code in a solution is amazing, check it out, it pops up a window with suggestions and you can preview the code where each word is found and edit it in this popup preview window, really neat
Anyone out there using Monodevelop/Xamarin Studio (a.k.a Visual Studio for Mac), stop wasting your time, this is the real deal.
I cannot agree with you more, as I’ve been using it and I’m very satisfied with it so far!
To be honest, I cannot really compare it with Visual Studio, because I’m on Linux. But at least it’s leaps and bounds better than MonoDevelop, which is the default IDE for the Linux version of Unity, in my opinion.
And as I was already accustomed with IntelliJ on which Rider is based, it helped minimizing the transition time it took me when I moved to the new environment.
I always liked how IntelliJ could detect my bad habits and mistakes in coding Java/Scala. So I loved it also, when I saw how Rider could do the same with C#. It has been an invaluable assist for me in learning C#, which language I still feel quite unfamiliar with.
So, I highly recommend anyone to give it a try, especially if you are using anything other than Visual Studio. (Don’t forget to install Unity plugin from the repository.)
Also if you work in many languages JetBrains makes a lot of good IDE’s, once you use 2 or more of there products the All products pack is cheaper than individual licenses. i pay $150 per year ($12 per month) for the all products pack which will include Rider when its out of EAP. Well worth it considering i make heavy use of Resharper(C++ and C#), dotpeek, Intellij IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and DataGrip.
I find its worth it, but i also use a lot of there products. Also yes the first year prices are pretty bad, but if subscribing yearly 2nd year is cheaper, and the 3rd onward is even cheaper still. It gets up to 40% discounted for long term users. Only you can decide where your resources are best spent though.
I’d recommend you to just try it out and see for yourself, as for now they offer it for free.
Try opening an existing project with it, and see if there are some inspection warnings (most likely, it will report many). In most cases, it explains why it’s a bad code, or how there’s a better way to do it with an option to fix it for you.
It’s one of my favorite features (along with its ability to convert auto properties in different forms), and Rider still has quite many such useful functionalities even though it’s still missing a few key features of IntelliJIDEA.
i find it can go overboard with inspections at times, but i do love its tools for refactoring. extracting code to a method, or create a new method based on usage of a non existent symbol. Or even simple things like being able to make a getter and setter for a field in the alt+return menu.
Yeah, I’ve been using Rider EAP for basically the past 6 months and it’s been great for me since I use IntelliJ in my day job. The familiarity was the biggest thing for me, but it’s been turning into a great editor for Unity dev. And like you said, the intentions and inspections are very powerful.
I’ve lost some faith in Jetbrains over the last couple of years. I used to absolutely love Resharper but it’s been so buggy. There are issues with its test runner, and I get really tired of having to manually clear the resharper cache every so often because it starts showing errors that don’t exist or intellisense stops working. I tried Rider once and it was a similar feeling, though it’s EAP so I don’t fault that, but I don’t trust them necessarily to keep the bugs ironed out. And, I didn’t find the workflow at all intuitive or user friendly (the majority of my development actually isn’t targetting Unity). It works great for some people, but I’m taking a pass on it. Since I started using VS2017 I haven’t even installed Resharper.
I prefer VS2017 in general. I would say the biggest advantage it has is that VS2017 is free for the Community Edition (unless you’re a decent sized company with a bunch of developers).
I couldn’t tell you what Unity specific features of Rider are really an advantage, especially up VSTU upgrades that add more scaffolding… but I can say that the Rider devs have been active in the Unity Developers slack group and they are actively looking for ways to improve integration, and talking about Solution and Project changes to help better integrate with Unity. Not sure I 100% agree with their approach, but I’d say it’s definitely advantageous that they’re working closely with the community to incorporate Unity specific improvements.
Well if you know Resharper, it has all those features built natively into Rider, with some other improvements.
Also Rider seems to be more lightweight than VS, quicker load up times etc.
Best is to evaluate Rider and see if it meets your needs
Learning the shortcuts is key though.
It faster for me, but to be fair, I haven’t installed any plugin yet. It has better Unity integration(i.e. support MonoBehaviour message so they don’t show up as unused). Also, better shaderlab support if you into that kind of things
It seems that Rider has VS keymap built-in, not sure how well it works though. I chose to use IntelliJ scheme since I already use it everywhere else
