Hi there!
The best IDE setup for shader development is somewhat subjective, currently these are some of the common tools:
- Visual Studio with the “HLSL Tools for Visual Studio” or similar extension set up to handle .usf/.ush files. In practice, while this may provide syntax highlighting and sometimes Go to definition works, it doesn’t always, especially when the include paths start with “/”.
- Visual Studio with the .usf/.ush file extensions set to use the c++ editor and the VS Chromium extension for search/navigation.
- Rider, but iterate by manually setting the missing permutations and environments.
- 10x editor (popular choice) seems to have pretty good Go to definition, fast text search and working syntax highlighting including for conditionally compiled code.
I’m curious to hear what other IDEs/Extensions developers are using for shader development!