Saw this Godot blog post on JetBrains supporting Godot which led me to the above link. I honestly love JetBrains tools and used RubyMine and IntelliJ for years. I’m thinking about trying Rider out, but I have some deadlines and I don’t want to waste too much time switching over.
I’m curious if anyone has used it and what they thought about it. TBH the rename feature alone may be worth it to me, but the Godot IDE has gotten much better in 4.5 as well.
@tibaverus and @pennyloafers I saw a thread where you two were discussing it, so I’m tagging you here.
Rider is incredibly powerful, and while I could never perfectly get VS Code or even Visual Studio to work properly with Godot (I always had at least some issues with both), Rider worked 100% perfectly out of the box with absolutely no setup required, on all my machines, including Windows, Linux, and even on my macbook air, and now that Godot support is built-in, you don’t even need to download any plugins to make it work (which you had to do before).
I’d say give it a shot, it’s free for non-commercial projects if you don’t want to pay for it, it has tools for debugging and profiling your code, and everything just works.
PS: If you don’t use C# but prefer just GDScript, in all honesty you’re still better off with the default, built-in editor, as Rider still has trouble finding references in some cases, and will think certain classes don’t exist at all even when they clearly do. I’m sure this will improve in the future, but for now, if you purely use GDScript, I’d stick with base Godot, but for C#, absolutely use Rider.
I’m using Rider for both a personal game project and at work (both using Godot/C#).
I agree with what has been said about the IDE working like a charm simply by launching it and pressing the “connect to Godot” button, which is soooo enjoyable. It was the same with Unity; it always took me a few moments to properly setup Visual Studio, while Rider always worked directly.
For the rest, the only thing I can tell you is that I never had any issue with Rider, the IDE is just very enjoyable to work with. The tools are great, and the Git integration is amazing (it’s been a while since I haven’t open a GitHub Desktop window as I’m now doing all of my git manipulations in Rider). As @tibaverus said, if you’re going for a C# project someday, try it and it’s very likely you’ll love it!
I usually take a hybrid approach. I develop in Godot’s editor for the responsiveness of the engine and the built in docs, the new game window is also a nice addition. i find that the VS code/Godot integration to be too slow. I do use VS code for code base searching and refactoring across files, as well as my git interface and terminal. Switching between them is a quick alt-tab.
Beyond that i haven’t had much exposure to proper IDEs. So maybe lacking the experience of using them makes me biased. They may make building the right environment of a project easier, but i feel like they obfuscate to much.
Like you guys, I just switch to Rider and I’m very satisfied of it. The UI, the debugger, the customization, I love everything.
I don’t want to hijack the thread but I have a question for the user of Rider:
I code in C# and there is just one thing I didn’t succeed to make it works , it’s the scene preview.
Are you able to see something in this panel on your side?
I don’t know about C# but the scene preview works fine for my GDScript project – select the .tscn file, open Scene Preview, and I see the scene node tree. Not sure why your script language choice would matter for that.
However, one thing I can’t figure out about Rider – it has way more spurious warnings than are enabled in Godot. I thought when connecting via Language Services it was supposed to honor the warning levels set in your Project Settings, but it seems to go further and bug me about every place I didn’t add a type hint, even for void returns. I’d be curious if anyone’s gotten that resolved.