Favorite code editor?

I'm not a huge fan of Monodevelop, and I'm having trouble using Visual Studio 2013, since the software is not working well on my machine. Does anyone have any other favored code editors that work well with Unity?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

What problems are you having?

 

Thanks for the response!

I just downloaded and installed Visual Studio 2013 Professional (for free as a student from dreamspark.com). I tried starting it through the first time through Unity, and the first login window did not refresh properly after I logged in. I was able to navigate pact it, by dragging the window back and forth across my two monitors to force the contents to refresh.

When I open VS2013 from Unity or on its own, it doesn't show all of the window's contents. It is as if it is not refreshing the view. I can force it to refresh parts of the window by resizing it, etc, but with this behavior, it is unusable. Any idea what might be the problem?

 

I was using UltraEdit but I recently switched to Notepad++, which is free and awesome. I know there are other more suitable programs out there for coding but I go back and forth all the time between game and web coding and I like things simple.

 

A number of people have reported a similar issue. A few found that disabling hardware acceleration within Visual Studio (under Tools\Options) corrected the problem. Others found that programs having overlays (such as Mumble) were interfering with VS and they needed to set them to not overlay onto VS.

https://connect.microsoft.com/Visua...-window-does-not-refresh-its-content-properly

 

Wow, the best solution! Turning off hardware acceleration fixed the refresh problem. Thanks!

 

Also, make sure to grab the Visual Studio Tools for Unity if you haven't already.

 

My favourite code editor at the moment is Sublime Text (v3) plus various packages (add-ons/extensions) for stuff like:

• Unity3D Syntax Highlighting (Unity-specific, C#/UnityScript)
• Unity Completions (Unity-specific auto-completion, C#/UnityScript/Boo supported, lighter version also available that doesn't slow down Sublime Text startup time as much)
• Unity3D Reference Search (search Unity docs for highlighted words)
• Shader Syntax (GLSL/HLSL/Cg syntax highlighting - this is based on another extension, which might only work in Sublime Text 2, but also includes support for Unity's ShaderLab: ShaderLanguages)
• Sublime-TortoiseSVN (SVN integration in editor. Press alt+c to commit current file, alt+u to update it or alt+r to revert it. Windows only, though)

You can find many more packages (though most are unrelated to Unity) at https://packagecontrol.io/, but they are installed through the in-Sublime Text tool called "Package Control" (click here for installation instructions).

Also note that to get Sublime Text to open a C#/UnityScript/Boo file at the correct line when you click on an error message in the Unity console, go to Edit->Preferences->External Tools in Unity and set the External Script Editor Args to "$(File)":$(Line)

Phew. That was a whole lot of links in one post.

 

I don't find anything wrong with Monodevelop, I've never had any issues with it.

 

Notepad++ – because it's free and very fast!

 

But so is Mono lol. Takes 2 seconds to load, saves in and instant lol.

 

Really? I have quite a good computer. Takes ages to load :/

 

Hmm, dunno lol. Never takes mine long and I have a crappy laptop lol.

ICore3 2.4 GHZ Dual Core lol.

 

MonoDevelop takes forever to load on my system, too.

 

That's weird, it has never taken long on mine lol.

Visual Studio takes about 10-15 seconds to load for me, but mono takes mine about 2 or 3 roughly(that's opening a script with it at the same time).

Once it is loaded, all scripts open in a fraction of a second for me.

 

I find MD really hit and miss with new versions.

If you're on Windows then VS 2013 CE + UnityVS really is worth the effort. I forgot how useful (usable) break-point debugging tools can be!

Sublime has tempted me a few times for use on OS X, but I have to admit I've been put off when I tried to give it a go because of all the extra fluff you need to install. I might give it a go again some time if that process has been streamlined.

I also quite like Notepad++ as a text editor, but it's not even on my list of considerations as a coding tool.

 

Do you happen to have a "color file" for UltraEdit that is unity specific?

King

 

I don't get how you can work with a code editor which doesn't support debugging (single stepping etc).

VS + Unity tools works fine for me.

But of course MonoDevelop sucks.

 

i havent been arsed to try anything else than monodevelop... but daaanngg does monodevelop SUCK

crashes on loading sometimes
shows errors that arent errors
autocompletes randomly when it feels like it
have to close unity and monodevelop and open them both back up sometimes for no reason to fix stuff... i guess recompiles code, but its like wtf!! .. yeah..

well ive used notepad++ but not really... doesnt have unity autocomplete which is nice... well, really, i use it more for seeing what stuff needs.

... not a code editor, but if you dont know... beyond compare is great for comparing 2 scripts for differences.. i came upon it when modding games and its AWESOME tool to have..

 

No, sorry. I was just using the standard js and c# setups.

 

When I first started using Unity I wasn't sure which editor to use, so I sort of improvised. I wrote out all of my code by hand in pen on paper, then took photos of it all with a Polaroid camera. I couldn't fit the whole page into the frame properly so I photographed each page in thirds.

I found an OCR program I'd coded in Assembly Language a few years before sitting on an old cassette tape. So I loaded that into a cassette player and recorded the sound of it through a headphone set I'd plugged into the mic input of my SoundBlaster card on a 486 DX2-66, and had it turn that into binary code.

Then I ran that OCR program and scanned in the Polaroids I'd taken (don't ask, that was a major pain in the neck involving mimeographs and... yeah, don't ask) and got the code I'd written by hand into a machine-readable format. It took a lot of fixing up but I managed to work it all out.

Because Unity didn't run very well on that computer I saved everything on floppy and then walked it over to my current desktop computer, a Cray-1 I picked up at an estate sale. From there I was able to get the code over to a regular consumer level PC where I had Unity installed, and voila, I was up and running.

So yeah, now I use Notepad++ and I also upgraded my camera to a Canon AE-1 so now I can fit the whole page of written code into frame before going to OCR. It's like night and day.

 

Still faster than MonoDevelop...

 

And if you have the cash, Resharper will really bring your Visual Studio environment to life. I picked it up last year and it's revolutionized my coding experience. Generating properties from fields is worth the price by itself.

 

Oh, you too? I thought it was just me

 

Not sure if anyone's seen this, and I haven't tried it myself since I'm using Visual Studio so I'm not sure if it helps coding in Unity, but if you're using SublimeText, Atom, Emacs, Brackets, Vim and are working with .NET, see:

http://www.omnisharp.net/

 

I don't get how I'm the only single person who's never had not one tiny problem with Mono, and I've been using it for about a year now lol.

 

I can use it, but it's got its warts. Auto-complete doesn't work properly when there are open parentheses, saving causes anything collapsed to expand and you lose your place, frequently the window locks itself to being on top... That's just the stuff I can pin down.

 

LOL, you crack me up.

 

LOL, well it could be because I'm used to things never working correctly and just don't realize it hahaahah.

 

Yeah, I know the feeling.

 

lol

 

I never had any real problems aside from it annoyingly messing with my formatting, but I was spoiled by Visual Studio long before I ran into Unity.

 

Yeah I used visual studio for awhile now. Just recently started using it again when I made that little Unity Helper program I posted on forums.

But wow, the scrolling is so slow on Visual Studio now that I'm used to Mono scroll speed lol.

 

@Xoduz NIce post! Does it support Go To Declaration and Find All References too?

 

I've used sublime, but even that felt hit and mis in many areas, such as auto-complete. it would bring up EVERYTHING possible, not filtering out what you need to what is not even applicable.
whilst it ok, it just doesn't have the right stuff i feel. i then have to go back to MONODEVELOP

MONODEVELOP for me is bad, very slow starting up. annoying that after saving a file it doesn't auto-update UNITY, rather i have to switch windows all the time. feels just sluggish.
its good for me with auto-complete, but just goddamn slow. really needs an update, really. also some input from UNITY for plugins would help i guess

i am currently writing out a plugin for a text editor i use, but will take some time because i want to make something that will cut out all the BS, have smart auto-complete and be quick. which MONODEVELOP is not

 

in a lot of ways, i wish i was a windows user, just so i can have visual studio. but mac seem to be behind in the field of UNITY and editors that work well with it

 

or there are 2 options.
1, use xamarin studio. since that is constantly being updated
2, use script inspector 2 from the asset store. seems to have plenty of great reviews and assume its still being actively updated

 

Visual Studio! Nothing else! Never!

 

I love Visual Studio, but at times I want to kick it in the face - hard.

VS 2013 Professional Quirks I've Had:
- 3 times now, all of my color preferences just disappear, and while using the dark theme for whatever reason all numbers end up in some dark-dark grey so you can't see them against a black background. Restart of VS required.
- About every other day, it changes the source control to Microsoft Git Provider. I have to close the docked window, change source control back to none, and restart. If I don't close the docked window, it will always set this back to the Git provider.
- If by chance the source control is set to Microsoft Git Provider and I don't notice it, VS consumes 100% of the CPU core. When I have 3 instances open at once for multiple projects, my laptop pretty much crawls... slowly.
- It's a PITA to install on a different drive than the OS, and even if you do, it still installs a huge amount of stuff on the OS drive. Yeah, don't try to put it on something with a small drive.

Not VS's Fault, but...
- VS Tools for Unity cause async callbacks with AWS SDK to timeout 50-75% of the time. It's awesome. Took me a few days to figure it out.

Regardless of the quirks/issues, I find it much, much, much better than monodevelop and wouldn't go back.

 

That's not up to the code editor, that's up to Unity. It's meant to detect when files have changed and re-load them accordingly. If it stops doing that there's a problem elsewhere. It's happened a few times for me. Usually a restart fixes it, though I'm not sure what the underlying cause might be.

 

On the Mac I must say that Atom + OmniSharp is my go to editor for virtually everything, any small/quick edits are done within VIM - Visual Studio on the Windows side, and can't suggest anything but.

 

Visual Studio 2013 all the way.

- nice modern UI theme (Like Unity pro dark)
- very professional look, responsive UI
- minimap of your code (Instead of simple scroll box on right side) you can enable minimap code where you see your entire code.
- Automatic color markings of where you edited code, saved code. errors in code on the right side of scrolling area.
- Can attach debugger to unity / can put breakpoints for better debugging (UnityVS)
- Can open reference to function/variable you are looking right under it. Example: You see call to function and you want to go ti its source. You press alt+f12 and window will appear under function call where you press of the function definition with its code. Very good without opening entire new window where that function is located.
- Have "Tasks" window where you can write yourself little tasks which you can then cross our as you go
- built in image editor
- VS 2013 Express is free!

 

Oh wow, I didn't know about the minimap. Thanks!!!
I once used a plugin to add a minimap, but it was bugged so I stopped using it. And now the minimap is integrated as a scrollbar! Awesome!!!

 

Haha no It has built in minimap.
Just right click on right scrolling area. Choose option or something and there will be option to enable it, set width etc.

 

Just wanted to add a couple points:
1) The 'Tasks' window will also show all of your inline '// TODO' comments
2) They now have a Community edition that is on par with the Professional version for individuals, education, academic research, open source projects, and smaller non-profits: http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

 

What features does it have? Does it support C#/Javascript apart from php, html, css? What features does it have which other IDEs doesn't?

 

It was a spam bot post

 

Yeah. I felt it was. Spam bots mainly create irrelevant threads, but it's just some guy who made his own IDE and picked the right moment to post it.
Not the best way to promote.

 

At the beginning I used Monodevelop, but then changed to VS. I think that Monodevelop is a good IDE, but the fact that you cant set 2 windows side by side and, that you get only one Monodevelop instance which makes quite hard to compare the code from two projects was what made me change the IDE.