All the best, and glad to hear you jumped to C#… so much better ;)

Cheers

Will

http://xamarin.com/studio
http://www.cliffordroche.ca/monodevelop-4-xamarin-studio-debugging-in-unity/

You can also use it to generate documentation using a tool like Sandcastle Help File builder, although that’s a bit awkward to use.

“Tom Francis uses Javascript? I use C#, but maybe he knows something I don’t…”

Thank you, the comments, for immediately and repeatedly reassuring me.

For the auto-completion both Visual Studio and MonoDevelop show me “Destroy” if I start typing “Des” ( on windows ). Again as said higher in the comments, auto-completion is context sensitive which means that the IDE will not show Destroy if it “doesn’t exist in the class context” ( in this case to use Destroy, the class must be a child of MonoBehavior ).

The shortcut “ctrl + space” forces auto-completion to happen.

And I also recommend using C#.

This link (note: apologies in advance, I only googled for sublime and unity, so you may have already checked this out and found it wanting, and I’m not 100% it’ll cover what you need. For instance, the auto-complete for common Unity classes and functions seem a little light. Also, as Sublime is in the main just a very advanced text editor, it’ll probably have difficultly figuring out which functions and variables any given instance will have access to) lists a Unity 3D plugin for Sublime.

http://www.holoville.com/blog/?p=512

Well you don’t need an external IDE, but depending on how you work, it can be very useful, since they usually offer a bunch of tools that help like code refactoring, code analysis, XML autocompletion for methods (and similar stuff), class outliner, and the most important thing (although without addons is only available in monodevelop) proper debugging.
I should probably mention that I have never used UnIDE, so the features I know are the ones I saw, it might have more and so on, and in my case I spend a lot more time refactoring, thinking on how to implement code, testing and so on, than I do actually writing it, so those features end up being more important to the way I do things, but I can definitely see how something like UnIDE can be useful, especially to quickly write something.

BTW I feel that someone should mention in case that it isn’t obvious by now, that IDEs are very much one of those things that also ends up depending heavily on user preferences.

P.S. Does anyone here use monodevelop frequently? I only use it for debugging, is it really that awful performance wise? I mean I know it had stupid stuff like it becoming very slow if you had a search on, but how slow is it these days on a nice machine (quad core, SSD, and so on)?

Looking at the list of request, most IDE’s will do what he requires by default, the biggest problem and something that is not going to come by default is “Colours recognised Unity terms differently to, say, my own variables” which I assume he doesn’t mean just differentiating between unity methods from his variables, but also differentiate unity methods from his own methods.
I also see them as somewhat of a non problem mostly because from a programming standpoint it doesn’t really add much to make such a distinction, it’s all objects and they are used in the same way that user made methods are, and differentiating between variables and methods is done by the c# semantic and code organization.

BTW forgot to say in my initial post, but not sure if game maker allowed OOP, if it doesn’t, and you don’t really know about it, you should probably learn it, a good C# book that might help (it’s not unity related, but most of the information translates) is head first c#.

If it were me, I’d try to hack up Vim since you get lots of bizarre powers and cross-platform functionality for free, and for better or worse these days they’ve increasingly abandoned the modal interface paradigm. Note that I do not claim I would ever get productive. It looks like you would want a Unity and C# combined .vim for the powerful custom highlighting half and one of a variety of tools with ctags for the function ‘prototypes’/’hinting’ half.

Overall Intro: http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_Vim_like_an_IDE (and See Alsos under Code Browsing)

Ctags Howto: http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2009/04/ctags-taglist-vi-vim-editor-as-sourece-code-browser/

Or assuming you don’t care about language anostism, Clang-complete for C#: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11300788/vim-function-hints-for-c

Highlighting customisation: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/736701/class-function-names-highlighting-in-vim

You could also try Textmate, although the Unity module for that looks a little stale.

As an aside, I’m surprised to see so many people warning you off Javascript. Almost all of the sample code available is in JS.

Note: I myself have only dabbled with Unity, so take that with a pinch of salt.

You will need to customise it to get it working how you like with Unity but a quick Google search should sort you out…

It is worth a look-see, the demo is free in the Asset Store. I suggest Googling it or searching in the store.

Awesome that you are learning Unity! Get UnIDE and you will be set! Have fun! I love Unity…

Now that you dropped Javascript and started to using C# I will move to the questions and additional help.

For the IDE you will want to use visual studio, it’s by far the best IDE around, and it fits quite nicely with unity, that being said you will end up going back to monodevelop when you want to debug since it allows you to pause the code, go line by line and so on, while visual studio doesn’t allow that by default.
As for the version of visual studio you can use the express version but it won’t allow you to automatically jump into the code, what I mean by this is that if your code throws an error in unity you won’t be able to just press that line and automatically launch the visual studio, open the class where the code is, and go to the line where the error is. To accomplish this you will need visual studio ultimate, although I believe if you have visual studio express already opened, it will go to the code line for you (might be wrong, never really used visual studio express).

If you end up buying visual studio ultimate (or even if you end up using express), please try the 2010 version as well, since in my opinion and in a lot of other people opinions the color scheme in the 2010 is much nicer to work with, so it will definitely be worth trying before buying.

Now for some useful resources:
https://www.google.com/cse/home?cx=001712401338047450041:csfhqk-trfa <- this is the most useful link you will ever have while using unity, you will use it constantly, if you need to know something type what you want to know and you will get search results with stuff only related to unity, trust me it's no exageration when I say you will use it constantly.

http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/ScriptReference/index.html unity documentation, you will also use that a lot, it's the MSDN of unity, it's extremely well documented, and it will tell you everything you need to know about the classes and methods that come with unity, you can also just use the previous link, since it will end up taking you to the appropriate link anyway.

http://blogs.unity3d.com/ unity blog not necessary to develop, but many times they end up showing tricks, or information about upcoming versions and stuff like that.

if you need any more help just reply here or hit me on my email which is micaelmor (it's a gmail email, I just don't type the rest because of web crawlers)

P.S. The reason why it doesn't show autocompletion on destroy() might be because you are not trying to use that method inside Update(), or Start(), or LateUpdate() or one of the different places where unity executes your Code.

Use C#.