Brutal Rider Plugin

The Brutal Rider Plugin adds specific functionality for the Brutal Framework to the JetBrains Rider IDE.

This plugin currently has the following features:

• Path resource search and completion
• Color wheel and color icon display on internal classes and methods

Installation with Rider

The plugin is unavailable on the JetBrains Marketplace as it is blocked by JetBrains. It can only be installed from disk.

1. From the Releases page, download the latest zip release.
2. Open Rider -> Settings -> Plugins -> Settings button (cog icon) -> Install Plugin from Disk.
3. Select the zip file we downloaded at step 1 and click OK.
4. Click OK to apply the changes and restart the IDE if prompted.

More info and instructions can be found here also: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/managing-plugins.html#install_plugin_from_disk

Features

Path resource search and completion:

• From the root folder of your project, if a Content folder exists, an auto complete box will be displayed showing the possible paths after pressing /. This can only be triggered within a string, for example "Content/Shaders/Line.vert".

  

Color support:

• Support for Brutal Color types. The colour icon is displayed left of the color values.

Warning: Currently not working. Opening the color palette editor works but does not update the color icon and values.

• Colour palette editor support. To enable place the cursor next to the color icon displays the context action in Rider (or Alt+ Enter) -> Pick color from palette which opens the colour palette editor to modify that colour.

How to Test

Building the project alone isn't enough to test code changes to the plugin. Unlike regular C# projects, Rider plugins must be run inside a special Rider host process. This launches a separate instance of the Rider IDE with the plugin automatically attached, this is the only way to test and experience any code changes before official deployment to the Marketplace.

Recommended: If you already have the plugin enabled via the Marketplace, it is good to turn this off so it does not conflict while testing the plugin.

1. In the Rider IDE the configuration MUST be set to the OS platform you are using:

• Rider (Windows) for Windows
• Rider (Unix) for Linux/macOS

2. Click the Play icon (Debug does not work).

3. Wait for the Rider daemon session to launch, if this is your first time this may take several minutes to launch as it installs several dependencies.

4. A new Rider window opens, from here you can create or open an existing Rider project. Make sure to select a project you want to test the plugin on.

Plugin Development Tips

• Refer to the official Rider Unity plugin and Godot plugin for examples of Rider plugin architecture. The Unity one is particularly good for color highlighting as they already have this functionality.

• Debugging is limited - breakpoints do not work when testing the plugin. Instead, Log statements must be executed at a Root error level to debug behaviour. For example in ColorHighlighterProcess:

// Unwind the argument values into a string for logging purposes
var argValues = string.Join(", ", arguments.Select(arg => arg.Value?.GetText()));
Log.Root.Error($"argValues: {argValues}");

Resources

• JetBrains Blog: Writing Plugins for ReSharper and Rider

• YouTube: Building Extensions for Rider and ReSharper (timestamped for the relevant section)