Rider Light edition?
Hi,
So I just downloaded JetBrains Rider (2025.2.3) to see if it could work for maintaining some old KSP mods on Linux. After coming back from a long hiatus I discovered that Monodevelop is long dead and I couldn't figure out how to get VSCode to support older versions of Mono. Monodevelop can still be installed on Debian 13, and it still works, but the Unity debugger plugin is no longer available.. so basic maintenance, yes, but debugging is back to the dark ages with “printf”..
So anyway, back to the main point - I downloaded and “installed” (ie, untarred) JetBrains Rider and.. I like it. No, I lie, I love it! It has vi key bindings and basically feels like a full IDE. More to the point, it was able to load and compile my KSP mod solution file with nary a complaint, having auto-detected my Mono install required to build it.
Most impressively I was then able to attach to the running game instance, set breakpoints, and basically have a modern debugging experience.
So some early feedback. It's perhaps a touch heavy on resources, but then again VSCode uses ludicrous amounts as well once you add a couple of plugins which are more or less essential to turn it from a glorified text editor into actually being able to develop with it.
I guess the biggest initial issue I have with JetBrains Rider is the massive 5 Gigabyte download which expands to nearly 6GiB. The main reason seems to be that it comes bundles with a HUGE pile of addins/components which I simply have no need for and will never use. There seems to be no way to uninstall them to reclaim disk space, they can only be disabled.
So firstly it was a huge waste of bandwidth to download the entire shebang, and now it's also wasting my disk space. Wouldn't it make much more sense to only bundle the core elements and then let developers pick and choose what they want/need? That would save server resources, network bandwidth, and disk space for those of us who are a bit limited already.
Anyway, keep up the awesome work, and thank you so much for making this IDE available for non-commercial use :)
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Thanks for your feedback!
Rider is based on the ReSharper backend engine, with a lot features on debugging/profiling on different targets (mostly based on IntelliJ platform). We previously tried to split Rider for different usages like Rider for Unreal/Unity, but didn't get a good result. We aim to create a out-of-box dev experience to users. Therefore, there will be some trade-offs in the size of the product installation package.
In the future we may have a installation manager allows you select your usages in Rider, it could be helpful to prevent spend too much space on IDE itself.