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:
When you install Unity on Windows and macOS, by default Unity also installs Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac, respectively. You can choose to exclude it when you select which components to download and 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, see Visual Studio C# Integration.
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, see the following Microsoft documentation pages:
Note: On Windows, Unity also includes Visual Studio 2019 Community by default in the installation package.
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, 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, 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 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.