On the PC monodevelop is lightning fast. But on the mac, it turns out to be literally unusable, you’ll type and wait ages then it catches up. This is typing very slowly with one finger.
There are a number of mac-related issues with monodevelop, particularly with macbooks. I notice it isn’t slow on the mac desktop. There’s a bug somewhere in there. Googling this reveals a widespread problem.
Will unity be looking into this, or do we take matters into our own hands and seek a solution? It doesn’t really affect me but it may be affecting some users on these forums so I thought it would be helpful to make a thread on it where we can share some information.
Disable Auto complete, and disable everything you absolutely dont need. The Quartz tip in the above link met with mixed results. At least monodevelop is usable on mac without autocomplete.
thanx for this. i just switched over to the mac partition for soem iphone dev, and so far, i really want to go back to windows! Anyway, mono develop is super slow on the mac side of things, and its normal on windows. Either way, I’ll be using something else for mac os development.
yes, I noticed the slow down aswell. The reason I cahnged from UDK to Unity was the speed up in dev time so this annoyed me. I am currently trying to alot time to figure out how to link my macbook and Windows machine so I can publish on the mac to test just so I don’t have to dev on my macbook. I’m thinking just a simple shared folder but whether tha’s possible or not through a VM I’m not sure. Even if I end up VM’ing Mac OS – wait, I’d need two licenses for two machines, right?
Hmm my 2011 MBP on 10.6.8 must be something strange then as was my 2008 MBP before cause neither of the two had slow down problems (the 2008mbp is on 4GB RAM, the 2011 one on 8GB). Much unlike parallels and VMWare that ran that crap slow that it was unthinkable to even consider using them for VS for example.
They had crash problems before but that was due to Typinator earlier 4.5 that didn’t work with monodev and crashed it upon copy - past - cut
@orrtcloud: if you install unity into the VM it will be the second machine. (you can have 2 concurrent installations per license)
But I’m unsure that it works there were limits from the security end that made it impossible to even install - run it there
I too do not have such major slowdown using monodev, till now, I cross the finger, my MB is a recent one (2011) ,still with 10.6.8, so i guess same config mostly as dreamora( less ram tho XD (4GB))
I have sometimes mono loosing ref, mean the autocomplete do not show me any of my class or even unity one ^^…but well nothing really bad,
and i am using it a good 12 hours a day as i am doing only iOS stuff…
I’m on an extremely fast PC and I don’t notice it being fast at all. Actually MonoDevelop is dreadfully slow on my computer. When I scroll in a 1000+ line file it can’t even render then lines correctly and all I get is a garbled mess. I have to CTRL + A to make the text readable again.
But I’ve gotten so used to the debugging now so moving back to Visual Studio isn’t an option.
Confirming that MonoDevelop is running at glacial speed on my Mac Book Air. This wasn’t the case in the previous version. But now it’s almost unusable. Something got borked for sure.
Yes I can also confirm using Unity 3.4 with the packaged Monodevelop 2.4.2 on a Macbook Pro (2.4Ghtz DualCore) on OSX Lion is painfully slow, and gets worse the longer the file is. At 600 lines+ using the program is a slideshow. I’d have used something else but monodevelop is the only way to debug on Unity…
Well at least it’s nice to know it’s not just me. I only recently got all setup with my brand new mac book (8 gig) and thunderbolt display.
MonoDevelop is a dog… I can’t even use it full screen on the thunderbolt display. It just becomes un-usable. When I keep the window small it’s useable but barely.
I really, really wish I could use Windows. I wish Unity had an iOS compiler in the cloud or something… Like the folks over at Delta Engine (http://deltaengine.net/) Something like that might allow us to do most of our dev on windows and then at the very end bring it over to mac and do any XCode specific integration.
Did you try the Monodevelop IDE 2.8.2 or later? I also pointed it to the the Mono 2.10.2 runtime. Everything is working absolutely fine here. I was having the same issue before, i think the unity guys customize some bits of the IDE,i vaguely recall a long time ago it wasn’t recommended to just copy over the version but i did anyway as i was suffering the same plight. I think it’s the shortcut to CMD+~ to open Unity help but not sure what else they do to IDE. As for runtime, yes probably not recommended but like i say, haven’t had a prob.
It seemed to fix whatever issue it was…the latest update from Unity then overwrote the MD IDE and it’s still all fine…
Thats with code completion off. I’ve never liked code completion.
It only gets this slow at times. Maybe even on longer scripts? I don’t know, monodevelop just seems garbage to me, though I’m sticking to because one day I might figure out what its actual benefits are, and therefore I’ll be more familiar with it. It would help if Unity Tech released some decent support videos explaining why this application is their advised choice. The sum total benefits over Unitron so far as I can see are:
code folding
.
AC
EDIT
I’ve had to quit this program like 6 times today with this creeping lag, and it happens when I’m in deep concentration barely grasping whats in front of me. My concentration is totally destroyed with this lag and having to quit/restart.
Hopefully UnityTechnologies have something positive to say on the matter.
Wow, that’s pretty bad. I had trouble with lag, but turning off code completion worked for me. For me, the benefit that Monodevelop has over unitron is source level debugging. I’d be toast without that. Hope you find what is causing your slowdowns! (I’m assuming you also turned off the other killer - “Syntax highlighting”)
This is one of the reasons why using Visual Studio instead of MonoDevelop is the way to go; the tools are much more advanced and mature, and I don’t think MD can ever bridge that gap. Of course, those using Unity Script will have to switch to C#, but aside from some people’s rabid devotion to their language’s religion, a programmer can learn new languages easily, especially ones that share many things in common, and since the API used is the same then there’s hardly a barrier to entry. This is not even about the merits of one language or the other, it’s about the environment/tool-set, and I believe that MD users will be having these type of issues and more for years to come. I don’t think the Unity folks have (or will have) the resources or the inclination to provide an environment/toolset that can compete in this area; I think their focus will always be on their engine.
When I scroll in a 1000+ line file it can’t even render then lines correctly and all I get is a garbled mess. I have to CTRL + A to make the text readable again. 
