An integrated development environment (IDE) is an application that combines a range of tools for developing software, typically including a code editor, code completion, code analysis and diagnostics, running tests, and debugging. Unity supports the following C# IDEs:
New installs of Unity on Windows and macOS include Visual Studio by default, unless you deselect it when choosing which components to install. By default, the External Script Editor (menu: Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor) is set to Visual Studio. When you enable this option, Unity launches Visual Studio and uses it as the default editor for all script files. For more information, refer to Visual Studio C# Integration.
On Windows, Unity includes Visual Studio 2019 Community by default in the installation package.
On macOS, Unity installs Visual Studio for Mac as the C# IDE. Visual Studio Tools for Unity (VSTU) provides Unity integration for Visual Studio for Mac (VS4M). For information on setting up and using Visual Studio for Mac, refer to the following Microsoft documentation pages:
Unity supports opening scripts in Visual Studio Code (VS Code). To open scripts in VS Code, go to Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor and select Visual Studio Code. For information on using VS Code with Unity, refer to Visual Studio’s documentation on Unity Development with VS Code.
To use Visual Studio Code for C# code editing and Unity C# debugging support, you need to install:
Unity supports opening scripts in JetBrains Rider. To open scripts in Rider, go to Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor and select Rider.
Rider is based on ReSharper and includes most of its features. It supports all C# 7.2’s features as well as C# debugging on the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime in Unity. For more information, refer to the JetBrains documentation on Rider for Unity.