Having some trouble adjusting to MonoDevelop

I've been out of touch with coding for, oh lets say a while, and so there are a few features of MonoDevelop I'm finding problematic, while others I need to learn about. My biggest bugbear is the completion suggestion mode. It's incredibly helpful to be able to press a key to enter a command or variable that I've only typed a few letters of but I'm simply unable to adapt to that key being space. If I'm declaring a variable called i (bad habit I know but it can happen with better named variables) and just type "int i =" it being automatically changed to "int if =" is a big problem, and there are bigger and harder to spot issues.

Adjusting my muscle memory to replace space with escape space just isn't happening so every session I need to ensure that completion suggestion has been properly toggled. Mostly it has but occasionally it seems to switch without my consciously having done anything. I've disabled the keyboard shortcut on the off-chance I'm somehow hitting it by accident but it still feels like a catastrophe waiting to happen. Should I be looking for a different editor or is there a better way to tame the beast?

 

I find Monodevelops intellisense to be rather meh at best. For instance, you'd think it wouldn't stick the keyword 'if' after 'int' considering that it would be malformed code. A type at the beginning of a line should always be followed by the name of its variable... so no completion of the next work, you're declaring that var.

Personally I don't use Monodevelop.

Are you on Windows?

Have you tried using Visual Studio? There is a tool you can get to go with Visual Studio that integrates with Unity nicely. It used to be called UnityVS and it cost 100 bucks, but Microsoft bought the company and renamed it "Visual Studio Tools for Unity", and released it for free:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/unitytools-vs.aspx

They also released Visual Studio Pro for free for small developers with Visual Studio Community (available as step 2 in that link).

 

This! I cant agree more with this. Anyone on windows, in my opinion, really should be doing this. It isn't that MonoDevelop is bad, its actually perfectly fine for small projects, but having Visual Studio integrated into Unity so well improved my productivity a lot.

Intelisense, the awesome refactoring features, Code metrics and well just so much more ....

May I add that I think MonoDevelop is good and I am not bashing it, I don't mind using it. But for windows Visual Studio is just so far ahead of the curve that I cant not recommend it.

 

Unity 5.2 was just released with native integration of Visual Studio Community 2015 + Visual Studio Tools for Unity. When you install 5.2 on Windows, just select Visual Studio and everything works automatically.

 

That's sweet.

 

There was a Q and A session on the last Unite where the devs were asked why they were supporting MonoDevelop when Visual Studio Community + VS tools exists, and are free. The answer was essentially "we have mac users".

There's a bunch of work being done on MonoDevelop, so you'll be seeing a newer version soon. It's still not quite where VS is. Try extracting a method in MD versus extracting it in VS; one is a glorified Copy-Paste, and the other is an

That being said, VS is 15 gigs of software at minimum, and there's a lot of bloat there. It'll be slow too - if you're using git for version control, VS likes to run it's own git implementation to eat all your CPU in the background, without ever telling you. If your computer is slow, be ready to wait 2-3 minutes from opening VS before you can actually write any code. Fun times.

When you get the cash, get Resharper. It's a plugin that turns VS from acceptable to actually being good. On the same scale, MonoDevelop is somewhere between acceptable and malware.

 

I've managed to get Visual Studio up now (weird, weird bugs with the installation came up in the last 48 hours apparently) and it looks like there's a way to lock this down. There's a few other promising options so this looks to be life saving advice

On the other hand I can't help but think Baste has just cost me £120. Resharper looks sooo tempting, yet so hard to justify at my current amateur status.