Starting from Unity 2018.1 we will be shipping Visual Studio for Mac instead of MonoDevelop-Unity on macOS. On Windows will continue to ship Visual Studio 2017 Community and no longer ship MonoDevelop-Unity.

With the (currently experimental) .NET 4.6 scripting runtime upgrade in Unity we are moving towards supporting many of the new exciting C# features available in C# 6.0 and beyond. It’s very important for us at Unity that we also provide a great C# IDE experience to accompany the new C# features.

On Windows, we ship Visual Studio 2017 Community with Unity and it already supports the latest C# features and C# debugging on the new .NET 4.6 scripting runtime. MonoDevelop-Unity 5.9.6 will be removed from the Unity 2018.1 Windows installer, as it does not support these features.

To support the latest C# features and C# debugging on the new .NET 4.6 scripting runtime on macOS, we are replacing MonoDevelop-Unity 5.9.6 with Visual Studio for Mac.

To summarize, we are making the following changes.

Removing MonoDevelop-Unity 5.9.6 from the Unity 2018.1 installer on macOS and Windows and no longer supporting it for Unity development starting from Unity 2018.1. Including Visual Studio for Mac as the only C# IDE on macOS in Unity 2018.1.

On Windows we will continue to include Visual Studio 2017 Community and no longer include MonoDevelop-Unity as an alternative.

Visual Studio for Mac already includes Unity integration out of the box and has since Unity 5.6.1, supporting both the latest C# features and debugging of C# scripts on the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime.

MonoDevelop-Unity users on macOS can download and install Visual Studio for Mac and start using it today.

C# IDE Alternatives

Besides Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio 2017 Community, there are now a few other C# IDE alternatives available.

Unity supports opening scripts in Visual Studio Code when selected as an external script editor in the preferences. See Unity Development with VS Code for details. The following also have to be installed for C# code editing and Unity C# debugging support.

Mono (Only required on macOS)

C# Extension

Unity Debugger Extension (Does currently not support debugging on the .NET 4.6)

Unity supports opening scripts in JetBrains Rider when selected as an external script editor in the preferences.

Rider is built-in on top of ReSharper and includes most of its features. It also supports all the latest C# 6.0 features as well C# debugging on the .NET 4.6 scripting runtime in Unity. See Rider. Cross-platform IDE for Unity for details.