Hello everyone.
Zed editor is now open source. As it seems a very fast and reliable tool, any chance that it could be integrated with Unity? As long as I know there is now direct integration now. And working with Mac makes me think of it, because Visual Studio for Mac is dissapearing. I know of Visual Studio Code but I’d like to get into another option.
I’d say: don’t get your hopes up.
VS and at a later point Rider, that’s the only two IDEs that have been supported all along and both sufficiently provide everything a developer needs.
VS Code just happened to sneak in there a few years back simply because it was an employee’s love-child, but has since been deprecated from Unity’s side and MS is continuing to develop it but it is still in “preview” and remains unsupported by Unity.
VS for Mac is still going until August 2024 plus an unspecified period of maintenance updates. I’m sure you’ll still be able to use it just fine going into 2026+. I would just wait this out until the last moment and let alternatives mature.
If you don’t need single-step debugging, ScriptInspector3 is an awesome alternative to using external IDEs.
I hear rumors he’s working on debugging support for SI4, maybe next year.
Thanks for the info. I’m using Rider starting four months ago and I’m very happy, but of course it’s a month payment and I’m just another desperate game developer. But in the end I think I will continue with Rider as other tools are not available. Always talking about Mac of course.
Would be nice, I’m trying it now, it opens really fast. If I could find some highlighting for shader code, I could be tempted to use it to replace sublime.
Unity support in VS Code has been pretty great as of late (Microsoft’s Unity extension is now out of Preview and the official C# Dev Kit extension is pretty decent), enough to convince me to stop paying for Rider. It’s still not as good as JetBrains’s deep integration with Unity, but I’d say it’s 90+% there, which is good enough for a lot of people.
I’m also using Zed for some Rust/Bevy development on the side and I’d love to see better integration with Unity down the line.
If you’re on a Mac and strapped for cash, I’d say VS Code (with the right extensions) is a no-brainer, at least for now!
Only if you need the latest version or haven’t paid for 12 months. Once you’ve paid for 12 months you receive a perpetual fallback license which allows you to keep using it without an active subscription. You just can’t get the newest releases.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/206544479-Subscription-based-licensing-model-vs-perpetual-licensing-model
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license
VS Code has been hopelessly slow for me so I don’t know. I’ll stick with Sublime I guess.
The point is, Unity doesn’t support any IDEs. Visual Studio (Code) is supported by Microsoft and Rider by JetBrains.
VSCode was the exception, a side-project of a Unity engineer, but Unity dropped it and got Microsoft to support it instead.
So, I doubt Unity will add support for Zed. You have to count on either a community-developed extension or on Zed Industries to make an official one. Unless the IDE has a focus on .Net like Visual Studio / Rider and the necessary resources, chances for a full-featured and polished extension are pretty small.
Did some simple package to integrate Zed into Unity as external editor, if someone would like to try it - you are welcome!