Unity no longer ships with a free editor/debugger? Is there a free alternative to VS?

Since MonoDevelop is deprecated in Unity 2018, is there a free editor we can use with debugging? Visual Studio Community cannot be used at my corporation, because its license doesn't allow it to be used at big corporations, you have to pay for the full Visual Studio. Which would be pricey to license for the entire team, after already paying for Unity licenses.

 

VS Code

 

Can you debug with VS Code?

 

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/other/unity

Other C# IDE alternatives are listed in UT's blog-post:
https://blogs.unity3d.com/2018/01/0...r-monodevelop-unity-starting-in-unity-2018-1/

 

I think you still can use the standard MonoDevelop instead of Unity's fork

 

VS express is free I believe but I'm also used to Mono and dislike the change.

 

Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition is free to use. Also, VS Code is a great free development tool. For VS Code exist a set of plugins (debugging, code snippets, etc. ) to speed up a unity game development.

 

Visual Studio Community Edition is not free to use if you work for a company associated with a corporation that has at least 250 PCs or has earned $1 million in the last year, unless you are working 100% in open-source or working on Visual Studio plugins. I currently work for a small company that is owned by a large corporation, so we would need to license the full Visual Studio for each Unity developer, or I guess get Visual Studio Code and try to hack together a bunch of plugins to try and match Monodevelop’s functionality.

 

I like Rider(https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/), its not free but you can try the 30day trial that will get u covered for a month and if you like it and do alot of c# coding i think the price might be reasonable (139usd /year individual, 3rd year 83usd) and gets cheaper the longer you have the license(also lets you debug unity). I think for a free solution VSCode(https://code.visualstudio.com/) should cover editing needs, not sure how well the unity integration is covered via plugins, but i'd rate it as a good alternative just for the fact thats free and extendable.

 

I recommend getting VS Code set up with all unity plugins added to it and syntax highlighting plugins etc. It works great once set up, is lightweight works on all platforms and is FREE

 

While it is true that it is lightweight, VS Code is a dinosaur that acts like notepad for many crucial things; like no autocomplete on overrides.

VS Community is free and your friend.

 

That's not entirely true, see "Installation and use rights":
https://www.visualstudio.com/license-terms/mlt553321/

 

Well if your company makes more than USD $1M, or has more than 250 PC, or more than 5 active users of Visual Studio (full time paid coders), you're likely to have the cash to pay for your software

 

Your *company* is likely to have the cash (or in my case, the company that owns my company), true. That doesn't mean your *budget* does. The basic version of Visual Studio is $540 a year per person, getting a team of Unity developers from Monodevelop (free) to Visual Studio ($540 every year) is quite the expense. It's much more likely they'll either go with "Just don't update to Unity 2018" or "Get that Visual Studio Code thing, it's free."

 

Well we're a team of 7 (3 coders, 3 artists, 1 community manager), and the total cost for our 3 Adobe Creative Cloud is ~$200 per month. We also burn around $20K monthly in human resources, and yet we're still allowed to use Microsoft free licence.

Anyone is free to use VS Code and Gimp if they feel like it, but for us the time/money it saves us vastly outbalances the licence cost. So at soon as we'll be past the 5 coders limit, then we'll pay and we think that is more than fair.

 

Maybe I've been spoiled by working in mostly silicon valley startups. But I cant' even imagine working at a company that didn't prioritize developer productivity and providing whatever tools are asked for pretty much. I realize that happens in the game industry but it's sad because they really just don't get it.

 

VS Community is free.

 

Except it's not for free everyone like already been said above and in the original post. Larger teams can't really use it legally.

 

Nevermind then