An integrated development environment (IDE) is a piece of computer software that provides tools and facilities to make it easier to develop other pieces of software. Unity supports the following IDEs:
Visual Studio is installed by default when you install Unity on Windows and macOS. On Windows, you can choose to exclude it when you select which components to download and install. Visual Studio is set as the External Script Editor in Preferences (menu: Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor). With this option enabled, Unity launches Visual Studio and uses it as the default editor for all script files.
On macOS, Unity includes 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, see the following Microsoft documentation pages:
On Windows, Unity also includes Visual Studio 2017 Community.
Unity supports opening scripts in Visual Studio Code (VS Code). To open scripts in VS Code, select it as the External Script Editor in the Editor Preferences (menu: Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor). For information on using VS Code with Unity, see 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, select it as the External Script Editor in the Editor Preferences (menu: Unity > Preferences > External Tools > External Script Editor).
Rider is built on top of ReSharper and includes most of its features. It supports all of C# 7.2’s features as well as C# debugging on the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime in Unity. For more information, see JetBrains documentation on Rider for Unity.