How-To's Plugin Highlights

Awesome Plugins for Rider: Code Editing/Analysis

This is the second of our three-part blog serious about popular plugins for Rider (and IntelliJ IDEs).

In this series:

As a little reminder, all of these plugins can be installed from the settings under Plugins. Now let’s jump right into it!

Cognitive Complexity

Our code grows and grows, but is it still readable? Most probably, a colleague could answer that best. However, the Cognitive Complexity plugin (also available for ReSharper) can help to understand – based on calculating a metric value – how readable and maintainable a certain method is. The cognitive complexity metric was proposed by G. Ann Campbell from SonarSource to tackle shortcomings of the widely known cyclomatic complexity metric.

Cognitive Complexity plugin

Heap Allocations Viewer

The Heap Allocations Viewer plugin (also available for ReSharper) is one of the plugins you don’t want to miss when writing or dealing with performance critical code. From the orange highlightings you can find out about boxing allocations, array creations, closure variables, string concatenation, and more. Don’t forget to always beware of premature optimisation! Read more in the dedicated blog post.

HeapAllocationsViewer plugin

IdeaVim

Better read more about StackOverflow’s most infamous question before installing the IdeaVim plugin. Some developers can’t live without it while others get trapped in chaos. In Rider you can always kick off the Alt-Enter menu and disable the Vim Emulator. So we definitely got you covered!

IdeaVim plugin

KeyPromoterX and Presentation Assistant

The KeyPromoterX plugin and Presentation Assistant plugin are all about shortcuts. Do you find yourself using the mouse a bit too often? Then KeyPromoterX will you remind you about the shortcut that you’re missing. Or are you pair programming with a colleague who is new to Rider and always asks about what shortcut you’re actually using? Then PresentationAssistant will show them and you can focus on the real work!

KeyPromoterX and PresentationAssistant plugins

Next week, we’ll look at some more plugin related to UI/UX. Stay tuned!

Download Rider and give it a try!

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