I’m just starting to do scripting with unity, but there are some things that I’m wondering about the MonoDevelop editor. It seems to have many shortcomings / usability issues compared to eg. FlashDevelop which I’ve been using earlier. Here is a list of things I’ve noticed. I’d be interested to hear your comments about these:
I start typing Instantiate and it doesn’t find any matches, but after finishing typing it, it recognized the function. Why doesn’t it find it directly?
If I get inside the Instantiate brackets through typing, it shows what the first parameter for the function is but if I jump into a later one, it doesn’t. With flashdevelop I’m used to getting to see the parameter just by jumping into the parameter I want, and “touching” the comma before the parameter I want. Is there any way to get this more practical in MonoDevelop too?
It doesn’t recognize even the private variables I’ve initialized in the very same script. Why? Private doesn’t mean non-existing (they are accessible for the code!) so this is something that feels really strange!
When choosing a variable that it has found, merely pressing enter will just change a line. One would need to first press down and then enter. I find this unnecessary, as I can’t think of any situation where I would like to just write some gibberish first and then change lines.
On the other hand in some situations it does prefill where it would not be wanted. At least when I want to use a single letter variable like i in a basic for loop and press SPACE after it, it automatically changes it to int. FlashDevelop doesn’t do this.
When putting in curly brackets, it doesn’t autotype the closing bracket.
It doesn’t seem to support collapsing structure.
Is there a pretty-print functionality?
I suppose part of the shortcomings may be due to having support for more scripting languages, but it would still be nice to get some of these things improved.
You may try to use the newest version which is now named Xamarin Studio. The debugging doesn’t work yet, but I use it since the release and for me, it works quite well. Before you open any single file, you have to sync it first: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/171632-MonoDevelop-4-aka-Xamarin-Studio .
There is no limitation. Xamarin Studio is freely available. Though there are commercial extensions for the Xamarin products for iOS, Android and Mac, which will bring no limitation within Unity. If you are looking for improvements of MonoDevelop, you should go with Xamarin Studio because it is in fact the newest version of MonoDevelop.
I was just puzzled with what Shubius says in this thread and the huge prices mentioned here: https://store.xamarin.com/ . So are you saying that there isn’t even a limitation on the app size?
Well I suppose trying doesn’t hurt any way, since there is always the option of going back to. But if Xamarin Studio is just the new Monodevelop, I wonder why it wasn’t included in the Unity 4 installation that I made just last month?
Because Unity has a custom addon for MonoDevelop that allows debugging of Unity directly from within MonoDevelop. This doesn’t work with newer versions yet.
