Terminal and IDEs

We will spending most of our time writing C# and C++ scripts in a text editor. Visual Studio Code (VSCode), Visual Studio, and Rider are the most popular choices amongst game developers. There are a couple of catches.

• VSCode now supports Intellisense!! Install the Unity VSCode extension!
• Visual Studio for Mac is different from the Visual Studio for Windows. They have the same name but they are different. The version for Mac has limited features and extensions you can use.
• Rider is a .NET IDE by JetBrains. I use this on my Windows computer with Unreal Engine.

We highly recommend using Visual Studio Code and Terminal for the Unity Engine. This will help us support you best since it has Intellisense and Copilot available for the Unity Engine. Please do not use word processors such as Microsoft Word to edit programs. Word processors can add extra content to documents that will confuse the interpreter.

For your reference, here are some other text editors:

• Atom: A more lightweight desktop editor.
• Vim: A command-line editor.
• Emacs: A command-line editor.
• PyCharm: A desktop editor designed for Python.
• Sublime Text: A text editor that works with code.

Terminal

The terminal is a program that allows you to interact with your computer by entering commands. You already have a program called Terminal or Command Line or something similar on your computer. Open that up and you should be good to go. When I am working on my MacBook, I default to iTerm. On my Windows, I default to Command Line.