Programmers work with various tools every single day. Starting from the very low-level parts of software, such as operating system and finishing somewhere little higher around modern IDEs and other time-saving programs.
There's no discussion that every software engineer uses text editor of some sort. While some use old school editors such as Vim or Notepad++, others tend to lean towards slightly newer software, which generally offers more modern and handy tooling.
When it comes to using IDEs (or text editors) with Unity, there is definitely a vast amount of software to choose from. The most popular IDE to use with Unity is probably Visual Studio 2019, which comes preinstalled with the first Unity version you download.
Other very popular IDE to use with Unity must be JetBrains Rider. An extremely robust piece of software, which helps you speed up your development process. I've been personally using Rider with Unity close to a year now and it's been such a time-saver.
The wake up call, which I've got from using Rider extensively for almost every day of the last year, was the importance of using moderns tools. To be fair, while working in VS or VSCode, I've only used a little amount of tools provided by the software. This came to haunt me with countless hours of debugging foolish mistakes, which were simply caused by my ignorance of the tools I've been provided with.
I've started using few debugging tools, but primarily smaller features, such as the godlike Refactor This command, which saves so much effort and time. With this command, you can, for instance, rename any class or function (and much more). The great thing about this is, that it renames all dependencies (or specifically usages), so you don't need to go through all of your code line by line and find it yourself.
This is a really tiny portion of features a modern IDE can offer. The important thing is to avoid the crucial mistake I've done, which was not using these to a full extent and thus making things harder for myself. Use every bit of tech you can and make things easier for yourself. It will definitely make the process of development a tad more enjoyable.
Top comments (2)
Great suggestion, though I don't think it is common for many Unity users to use a text editor over an IDE. However apparently it is common for developers to not feel the need to debug. The father of the FPS genre was on a Lex Fridman podcast and talks about this. If you find 15 mins to give to a game developer god give this clip a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzr7hRXcwkw&t=157s&ab_channel=LexClips
Yeah, while this is true, I still know (and find new) people who use VSCode as their go-to editor for Unity.
I will make sure to take a look at that podcast. It looks really interesting! :)