I have run into a number of previously reported issues with the version of Monodevelop that shipped with 3.5.1 version of Unity on the Mac.
a) Is anyone regularly compiling Monodevelop out of the Unity github repository and willing to share?
b) Any one have the steps to compile the source from the github repositority including installation of required prequisite packages?
Thanks
iByte
Bump and a shout out to anyone in Unity Dev (Levi?) that actively works on Monodevelop to post occasional builds on github … pretty please???
iByte
Monodevelop functionality for endusers
is not relevant to Unity corporations interests
and also do a refactoring (e.g. renaming a public function) is really slow…
In 3.5.2f2 is still slow…
Unity, please fix this!
Thanks a lot
bump - did this get any love in Unity 3.5.3?
iByte
Refactoring is taking ages! No one else felt that mono has a problem??
Doesn’t appear to have been updated … Unity support please tell us why this cannot be fixed?
This is a real PITA!!!
iByte
MonoDevelop’s release cycle isn’t linked to Unity’s release cycles. It’s made by a completely separate bunch of people.
MonoDevelop’s speed has been an issue for some time—especially its load time, which takes ages on my MacBook Pro with its SSD. Hell, it takes longer to load than MS Word!
Personally, I just use Unitron for smaller projects. It’s still installed with Unity; you just need to change the Unity preferences to use it. What it lacks in features, it more than makes up for in just plain working properly. (Also: BBEdit or TextWrangler can be made to work with C# code. The necessary file can be obtained from here.)
Unfortunately, only Unitron and MonoDevelop are able to ‘see’ the Unity API as well and pop-up the relevant helpful info. Which is a shame. You’ll probably want to have the Unity Scripting Reference pages open somewhere while programming.
So this is a problem with OSX…
I’m too working with a Mac Book Pro, slow loading, slow refactoring. It makes me want to turn on my PC and go for VS.
Just tried Mono Develop 3.0, it seens fine, it starts faster, refactoring is instantly but it has issues working with Unity, when saving files it will aways warn about files being edited outside mono.
I’m now using Unity 4.0 on the Mac, and this is still happening. This has been an issue for a long while now. Why hasn’t this been fixed?
I understand that the Unity version of MonoDevelop is a special build, but there have been 26 separate releases of MonoDevelop between the version Unity provides (2.8.2) and the current stable release (3.0.5).
When can we expect this issue to be resolved?
Refactoring and finding references is very, very slow. It just took 2m 38s to search the solution for references of a class method that is only called once. This is insane. I’d like to be able to safely refactor my projects without waiting minutes for it to respond.
Please fix this! I’ll happily work with Unity developers, if they are unable to reproduce the issue locally.
I have a friend who also uses MD on OSX and he also has problems with it. The program freezes every now and then, and trying to resize the window by dragging the edges crashes the program.
That does not help much.
UT made custom modifications to their MonoDevelop and forked it long ago which makes it quite a bit more complicated to update it to the real thing. Unity at the time runs on an MD base thats very old, potentially even dating back to pre-Xamarin days which is huge given the massive boost mono got since Oracle killed mono inhouse after the Novell takeover forcing Xamarin into existance.
The official MD is infinitely faster, takes a lot less memory and it has heard the words ‘cpu efficient’ and ‘cache’ for intellisense and reference lookup, words the UT version of MD obviously never heard given that it can bring down a Core i7 Gen3 cpu running on a Samsung 830 SSD on SATA3 backed by 16GB RAM.
Unluckily the official MD has a few stability problems too but I none the less use only the official one for any larger project as solution wide text search is painfull yet the only replacement for ‘find reference’ which UT degraded to a joke taking minutes on real scale projects.
(funny enough the full text search takes fractions of a second despite its cache being much much larger and more complex to scan so please don’t ask me what UT broke in detail and where)
Yes Unity MonoDevelop is an older version, I think Unity should upgrade to 3.0.4 it’s faster at most things, well for MonoTouch it is 
Which version of MD are you using? Are you using latest stable 3.0.5?
I’ve read that using a non-Unity version of MonoDevelop introduces a number of issues, such as opening multiple instances of a script when you double-click on entires in the Unity Console, and losing debug support.
I’m using MD 3.1 and the annoyances are well worth having an IDE that doesn’t take 5 minutes of processor meltage to open a file or find references so you can actually use it as a modern IDE rather than a glorified text editor. Having it not crash half the time when doing something as simple as search and replace is nice too. Though if there were a way to get it to not pop up an error message and double all the open files when signaled from Unity it would be a helluvalot less annoying. At the moment I usually look at line numbers and find errors myself rather than clicking on the Unity console. 
But this is just another area where UT has neglected the process of actually making and maintaining a working game while all their focus is on checklist features for management types who don’t deal with any actual coding (or prefab nesting, or UI, or physics, or networking, or…).
True but Unity does “ship” the Mondevelop IDE in “their” product. I have no insider knowledge but from what I can take away from Unity’s own web site is that folks who were tasked to work on the Unity flavor of Monodevelop were given other higher priority tasks like getting the Linux client out the door.
I feel like it’s been abandon’ed since there is no good replacement for it on the Mac. Perhaps? the Unity devs do all their work on windows, use Visual studio and obviously don’t give a shit.
iByte
I agree with all of you. I can not understand why monodevelop is not updated.
When I open a new file is about 7/8 minutes to open the file on a very very new mac mini.
This is really annoying.
You should try the new mono which is now called Xamarin Studio. Its so much faster.
But we are a company and Xamarin is expensive. Moreover, we have already paid a lot of money for Unity, we would like to use its IDE normally
Since you are not deploying using Xamarin and are using it as an IDE to Unity you probably do not need to buy a licence that costs money. I admit that it is not clear but if you go on the MonoDevelop site when you select download you get Xamarinstudio4.0 (the free one) and MonoDevelop is free. The only reason Xamarin has plans that cost is because you can code and compile ios on it but since you wont be using it like that, I’m pretty sure you could be allowed to use the free version for your team. Best thing would be to send them an email to clear the confusion.