If you’re working with Unity on a Mac you are unfortunately stuck to the ugly, outdated and painfully sluggish, MonoDevelop. There are some alternatives like using Sublime, TextMate, or, if you’re on feeling adventurous, you can even use Visual Studio (with the amazing UnityVS) from a virtual machine. However, none of these options is really convenient since you either have to give up on most benefits of a true IDE or you have to use a resource hog VM.

Fortunately now there’s another option, that while it won’t allow you to completely ditch MonoDevelop, it will definitely make you spend less time with it. Let me introduce you to the amazing Script Inspector!

For the past several weeks I’ve been trying out the Beta of the upcoming version 3. It’s still not available to the public but Flipbookee was kind enough to let me try out the Beta version and I must say I’m VERY impressed!

The basic concept of Script Inspector is to allow you to edit your scripts without ever leaving the Unity editor.

The best part is that on this new version, you now get full auto-complete, code hinting, snippets, syntax error highlighting and much more! You can see what’s it all about on the product forum thread.

Now, don’t expect this to fully replace your IDE (at least not yet) since some stuff like refactoring, debugging and a few other bits and pieces are still missing. A slight pain point for me is that since the plugin is integrated into Unity you have to rely on some not so standard key shortcuts to bypass the ones from Unity itself.

However, the truth is that since I’ve started using this plugin I have to rely a lot less on jumping into MonoDevelop (and wait several seconds for it to sync) and can I simply edit my scripts instantly. Really convenient!

While Script Inspector 3 is still not available, it should be pretty soon and if you buy version 2 you’ll get the update for free! Do yourself a favour and get it now!

Once it’s released I’ll probably do a more in-depth review, but for now feel free to ask any questions here on the comments section or just follow me on Twitter.