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Free Code Editor/IDE without issues!

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by andyz, Apr 15, 2020.

  1. andyz

    andyz

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    [At risk of dragging out IDE wars] I am finding Visual Studio Community with Unity increasingly problematic (buggy), not sure if VS, VS unity plugin, or Unity 2018 LTS exactly but it is annoying.

    Sure I can spend money on xxx but this is about free options.
    Does VS Code or other free editor offer a more robust & lightweight approach while still having awesome intellisense and debugging?
     
  2. CodeSlug

    CodeSlug

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    IDE by Jetbrain like Rider is considered the best in the world but it is very expensive
     
    Meltdown likes this.
  3. Murgilod

    Murgilod

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    Literally the first word in the title is "free"
     
    matkoniecz, Joe-Censored and andyz like this.
  4. kdgalla

    kdgalla

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    Not that I know of.
     
  5. ippdev

    ippdev

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    What kinds of issues are you presented with with VSC? I had some and found out I was missing the C++ libraries, probably due to Windoze forced updates and that solved some i ran into. A few years back on OSX it was nearly useless.
     
  6. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    VS code works well enough, but has its quirks.

    It is not lightweight, because for some insane reason somebody decided that writing IDE in typescript is a good idea, but it is much faster and more responsive than visual studio community.
     
    Martin_H likes this.
  7. andyz

    andyz

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    Strangely 2018 was great but VS 2019 is choppy at times (windoze) and switching back to Unity has some major issues on occasion - cs files can appear un-imported like txt files breaking the project until re-imported, or Unity just crashes. It's nearly great
     
  8. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

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    Vim is free and at this point has had pretty much all of its bugs worked out ;)

    Though good luck with that
     
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  9. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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    Given the hassle you get with other options, vim looks more and more attractive with each day.
     
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  10. unit_dev123

    unit_dev123

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    We are currently using something called monodevelop.
     
  11. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Visual Studio. I know you said you want alternatives because you're having problems with it but it's legitimately the least problematic and there aren't any good alternatives to it. Visual Studio Code is popular with some people but it's problems are far more common and frequent than the problems of Visual Studio.

    You said you wanted this to be about free options but to be blunt the only good alternatives to Visual Studio are the paid alternatives and one of the best in my experience is an IDE that sits inside of Unity called Script Inspector 3. It's very low cost too at only a one-time payment of $39 per seat.

    https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/visual-scripting/script-inspector-3-3535
     
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  12. ippdev

    ippdev

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    Thanks for pointing that out. I am now starting to wonder if the frequent crashes over and over that Unity tech could not nail down were VSC related. It was open in the background and the thought only occurred to me a few times and quickly dismissed as i couldn't make a connection as to why.
     
  13. Ony

    Ony

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    I'm still rocking Notepad++, year after year. It's free and awesome.
     
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  14. CovalenceSTU

    CovalenceSTU

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    I use Notepad++ for editing code, it's lightweight enough to run alongaide my biggest Unity project but still formats the code properly. It's free too ;)
     
    Ony likes this.
  15. andyz

    andyz

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    lol I love it for making notes but I want clever intellisense etc and debugging!
     
  16. neginfinity

    neginfinity

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  17. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    I wouldn't call $13.90 a month 'very expensive'.

    Rider is by far my favourite IDE for coding with Unity.
     
  18. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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  19. CodeSlug

    CodeSlug

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    your game looks awesome
     
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  20. Ryiah

    Ryiah

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    Meltdown likes this.
  21. lightbug14

    lightbug14

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    I use Visual Studio Code as my main code editor for everything. I'm not sure about the debugging part, but this is what i can share about this editor (at least the things i like from it):
    • intellisense seems to work very well (in my experience).
    • It's a lightweight code editor (not an IDE) compared to VS. It opens in about 2 seconds and the whole project is loaded in about 4 to 6 seconds (the "omnisharp" part).
    • It looks really good, no matter what skin you choose (sometimes the look and feel is very important).
    • It supports regular expressions for the "Find" utility.
    • You can tweak a lot of settings.
    • It supports custom code snippets (really useful stuff).
    • It supports most of the languages. I even use it with html, css, js, react, matlab, c++, c# (of course) ... you name it.
    • Extensions!!! yeeees, you don't like something, just see if that extension does that for you, there are a lot of them.
    Probably someone with more experience can tell you more about this editor.
    Just give it a try.
     
  22. andyz

    andyz

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    OK thanks, think it's clear VS options cover best free and Rider is a modestly priced upgrade, though last time I tried it I found it so overloaded with features I suspect I would just turn most of them off for speed & simplicity until it resembled VS! (VS community itself is a bit overloaded if you have codelens on in 2019 which can cause sluggishness)
     
  23. Meltdown

    Meltdown

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    Rider basically is Visual Studio + Resharper without all the VS Bloat.
    Once you get to learn all the keyboard shortcuts, you'll never go back to anything else.