JetBrains Rider - Awesome cross-platform code editor from the people who make Resharper

I found out about this IDE the other day.

I'm a big fan of Resharper, and it does wonders for my coding productivity in Visual Studio, but this IDE is much more lightweight, and has all the latest Resharper features built in. It also has an extension for Unity (available as an option when you install it).

Its free while in early access, so check it out here... available for PC, Mac and Linux.
https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/download/

Tips :
I had to turn on a setting called Cyclic Expand Word to get suggestions automatically when typing a new word (instead of using CTRL+ENTER) to get things completed. So you might want to turn that on.



Learn as many keyboard shortcuts as you can, this is where this tool becomes really powerful

Also the CTRL+SHIFT+F window for finding code in a solution is amazing, check it out, it pops up a window with suggestions and you can preview the code where each word is found and edit it in this popup preview window, really neat

Anyone out there using Monodevelop/Xamarin Studio (a.k.a Visual Studio for Mac), stop wasting your time, this is the real deal.

 

I cannot agree with you more, as I've been using it and I'm very satisfied with it so far!

To be honest, I cannot really compare it with Visual Studio, because I'm on Linux. But at least it's leaps and bounds better than MonoDevelop, which is the default IDE for the Linux version of Unity, in my opinion.

And as I was already accustomed with IntelliJ on which Rider is based, it helped minimizing the transition time it took me when I moved to the new environment.

I always liked how IntelliJ could detect my bad habits and mistakes in coding Java/Scala. So I loved it also, when I saw how Rider could do the same with C#. It has been an invaluable assist for me in learning C#, which language I still feel quite unfamiliar with.

So, I highly recommend anyone to give it a try, especially if you are using anything other than Visual Studio. (Don't forget to install Unity plugin from the repository.)

 

Thing is, how much will it be once you've come to depend on it like Resharper?

 

They announced their pricing earlier this month:

https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2017/05/03/rider-licensing-pricing/

 

Also if you work in many languages JetBrains makes a lot of good IDE's, once you use 2 or more of there products the All products pack is cheaper than individual licenses. i pay $150 per year ($12 per month) for the all products pack which will include Rider when its out of EAP. Well worth it considering i make heavy use of Resharper(C++ and C#), dotpeek, Intellij IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm, and DataGrip.

 

So you'd say their stuff is generally worth it? I hear good things, but my bank account weeps openly at their prices.

 

I find its worth it, but i also use a lot of there products. Also yes the first year prices are pretty bad, but if subscribing yearly 2nd year is cheaper, and the 3rd onward is even cheaper still. It gets up to 40% discounted for long term users. Only you can decide where your resources are best spent though.

 

I'd recommend you to just try it out and see for yourself, as for now they offer it for free.

Try opening an existing project with it, and see if there are some inspection warnings (most likely, it will report many). In most cases, it explains why it's a bad code, or how there's a better way to do it with an option to fix it for you.

It's one of my favorite features (along with its ability to convert auto properties in different forms), and Rider still has quite many such useful functionalities even though it's still missing a few key features of IntelliJ IDEA.

 

How many hours do you spend a day coding? If you get to use all their shortcuts I'd say you can get a 20-30% boost in productivity

 

i find it can go overboard with inspections at times, but i do love its tools for refactoring. extracting code to a method, or create a new method based on usage of a non existent symbol. Or even simple things like being able to make a getter and setter for a field in the alt+return menu.

 

Yeah, I've been using Rider EAP for basically the past 6 months and it's been great for me since I use IntelliJ in my day job. The familiarity was the biggest thing for me, but it's been turning into a great editor for Unity dev. And like you said, the intentions and inspections are very powerful.

 

also if not already mentioned, if you are using it with Unity its a good idea to install this plugin to unity
https://github.com/JetBrains/Unity3dRider

than in rider, get the unity plugin from the plugin repo

 

I'm very much a newb in C#, so I usually follow those suggestions blindly

 

I've lost some faith in Jetbrains over the last couple of years. I used to absolutely love Resharper but it's been so buggy. There are issues with its test runner, and I get really tired of having to manually clear the resharper cache every so often because it starts showing errors that don't exist or intellisense stops working. I tried Rider once and it was a similar feeling, though it's EAP so I don't fault that, but I don't trust them necessarily to keep the bugs ironed out. And, I didn't find the workflow at all intuitive or user friendly (the majority of my development actually isn't targetting Unity). It works great for some people, but I'm taking a pass on it. Since I started using VS2017 I haven't even installed Resharper.

 

I'm a student so I got their products for free, I'm going to enjoy this because it won't last forever

 

There is a monthly subscription now (cheaper on personal license) that is available for Rider.

 

What are advantages of Rider over VS2017? Has anyone switched from VS to Rider?

 

I prefer VS2017 in general. I would say the biggest advantage it has is that VS2017 is free for the Community Edition (unless you're a decent sized company with a bunch of developers).

I couldn't tell you what Unity specific features of Rider are really an advantage, especially up VSTU upgrades that add more scaffolding... but I can say that the Rider devs have been active in the Unity Developers slack group and they are actively looking for ways to improve integration, and talking about Solution and Project changes to help better integrate with Unity. Not sure I 100% agree with their approach, but I'd say it's definitely advantageous that they're working closely with the community to incorporate Unity specific improvements.

 

Well if you know Resharper, it has all those features built natively into Rider, with some other improvements.
Also Rider seems to be more lightweight than VS, quicker load up times etc.

Best is to evaluate Rider and see if it meets your needs
Learning the shortcuts is key though.

 

It faster for me, but to be fair, I haven't installed any plugin yet. It has better Unity integration(i.e. support MonoBehaviour message so they don't show up as unused). Also, better shaderlab support if you into that kind of things

It seems that Rider has VS keymap built-in, not sure how well it works though. I chose to use IntelliJ scheme since I already use it everywhere else

 

My main interest in it (I haven't gotten around to actually trying it out yet) is that it's cross-platform. Visual Studio has worked great for me but it's restricted to Windows. Rider runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

 

So far i found rider to work pretty great compared to visual studio. Functionality wise for unity users it is on par with VS + ReSharper minus some issue with the debugger. I moved over to it mostly because i do some of my development on macOS and it was just easier to use the same IDE everywhere.

It also has a pretty decent Unity plugin that is aware of Unity messages, and when it does it code analysis and hinting is also aware of things like SerializeField and will mark them as implicitly defined

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/mac/

Edit: Honestly though... cross platform is a good thing as long as the experience is consistent. I've not used VS for Mac, but the user interface looks quite a bit different (looks more like that of VS Code but with more features), so I'm betting Rider offers a more consistent experience across platforms which is another pro for it.

 

For those who just started using Rider, try hitting ALT-Enter at various places and you will find that it can do many amazing things like automatically fixing some errors, converting properties back and forth between auto and computed form, and more.

I can't say much about VS2017 since it doesn't run on my Linux PC. But along with the inspections it's one of the key features that made working with Rider such a productive experience for me, so I'd encourage you to try it if you haven't already.

 

Yeah I noticed this too, do you know if this is something they are aware of and fixing?

The issue I had was Unity seems to go WTF when I debug with Rider.

Although that could just be Unity being Unity but I don't have that issue with VS 2017

 

That's a rebranded Mono Develop. It won't have anywhere near the same functionality.

 

Ahh yeah I'd forgotten about that. It's MD4 if I recall.

 

When I last tried Visual Studio with Unity, every time I created a new script, VS would pop up with, "The solution 'xxxxxx' has been modified outside the environment." It was driving me nuts.

Does Resharper have this same problem or can it be made to play nice with creating scripts inside Unity?

 

Yeah they know about it, i have a ticket for that one, and i talk with one of there devs in slack from time to time. IF you are talking about the same issue as i am, where sometimes the typename or var name is missing from some fields.

It seems to be a problem with the mono debugger that unity exposes, and thus could be fixed on either the unity side, or a workaround made on the rider/monodev side

 

What about auto formatting options? VS had an issue with Inserting spaces into ){ which was driving me nuts and couldn't be turned off, which was one of the reasons why I only used Monodevelop for C#.

 

That'd be nice if that's an option. That's one thing that's driving me nuts on a current project. Most things I could take care of by using an Editor.config file and the rest with Resharper. Adding spaces inside curly braces violates the linting rules on my current team project, but there's currently no way to change that behaviour in VS, even through Resharper... so I'd be surprised if Rider does it as well.

 

Like other IntelliJ based products, Rider allows very fine-grained settings over code formatting. Below shows how you can control spaces between parentheses, and there are similar options for curly braces as well too.

 

Good to know. Resharper isn't as fine grained.

 

The same setting exists in ReSharper

 

I wonder if its as performance hogging as resharper I love resharper but F***, that plugin slows things down in larger slns. I'm on a 8 core Ryzen at 3.9 ghz, 32 gig ram and m.2 SSD, the thing is still slow

 

Does it have "Search on Double Shift" nonsense? Pycharm has this hotkey enabled by default, and it can't be turned off without hacking some of the *.jar files.

 

try turning off solution wide analysis. This has massive massive costs.

 

Holy crap, where? I'll look again. I hadn't been able to find it.

 

Resharper is a hog because it's a plug-in that modifies a lot of behavior. Rider is pretty fast.

 

Its opt in, and I have not turned it on

 

They also need to dedicate an entire major version to optimization only, not a single new feature, just optimization.

 

I stopped upgrading resharper at 6.1 - which is definitely pretty quick and not buggy.

Are the later resharpers a mess?

 

i remember there being a few bad versions, but latests seems fine again.
Only issue i had is Facebook gameroom F***s with some keybinds and stops the alt+return quickfix menu from working.

 

Yes, it's still there and I'm not aware of any way to turn it off. It doesn't bother me much though.

 

Haha... I had this problem too, my ALT+ENTER also wasn't working! Took a while to figure out Gameroom was the culprit. Like WTF, a tray application that blocks ALT+ENTER??

 

It's awesome, but a bit expensive :-(

 

Compare it to Visual Studio Professional though and it becomes much more reasonable. Visual Studio Community has a limit of five users which is very easy to hit. Visual Studio Professional is either $45/mo or $1,199/yr ($799/yr renewal).

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/

 

Really never understood the problem with posting on old threads, can you explain why it's a problem?