First steps with JetBrains Rider

The first step

JetBrains Rider is a keyboard-centric product. Most actions have default keyboard shortcuts, which you can customize.

Among all the predefined keymaps, you will most probably choose one of the following:

• Visual Studio 2022 — this keymap is recommended for Windows users who have experience with plain Visual Studio without ReSharper.

• IntelliJ/IntelliJ (macOS) — this keymap is recommended for users who have experience with IntelliJ IDEA or some of the JetBrains IntelliJ-platform-based IDEs and who preferred to use the IntelliJ/macOS keymap there.

• Visual Studio/Visual Studio (macOS) — this keymap is recommended for users who:

  • have no experience with other IDEs;

  • have experience with Visual Studio + ReSharper and who preferred the 'Visual Studio' keyboard scheme in ReSharper.

• VS Code/VS Code (macOS) — this keymap is recommended for users who have experience with Visual Studio Code.

• ReSharper/ReSharper (macOS) — this keymap is recommended for users who have experience with Visual Studio + ReSharper and who preferred the 'ReSharper 2.x/IntelliJ IDEA' keyboard scheme in ReSharper.

For more information, refer to Customize keyboard shortcuts

Access frequently used commands

The navigation bar at the top of the Rider main window does not show many commands, but the most indispensable ones are at your fingertips:

You can build your solution, change and manage build configurations and run/debug configurations, launch and stop your program, access VCS operations, and search everywhere.

Navigate and search

JetBrains Rider provides a lot of navigation and search features. Let's look at some of the most useful ones.

Jump to declaration

Press the Ctrl key and hover over your code. You will see that all symbols defined elsewhere become underlined when in focus. You can click any symbol while holding down the Ctrl key to navigate directly to its declaration. If the symbol is defined in the current solution, JetBrains Rider opens the corresponding file and brings the caret to the declaration. If the symbol is defined in a compiled library, JetBrains Rider will decompile the declaration for you.

For more information, refer to Go to Declaration.

Check available navigation actions

Another handy navigation shortcut is Ctrl+Shift+G. When you press it on any symbol, JetBrains Rider will show you all available navigation options:

For more information, refer to Navigate To.

Code in the editor

When you are working in the editor, many code editing helpers are at hand. Here are a couple of them.

The power of Alt+Enter

Very often you will see one of many different action indicators in the left part of the editor. You can press Alt+Enter to see what JetBrains Rider has to suggest at the current caret position:

Here are a couple of examples:

• If you see a red bulb or a yellow bulb icon, this means JetBrains Rider has detected an error or other code issue and it can help you fix it. Press Alt+Enter to take advantage of this. For more information, refer to Quick-fixes for code issues.

• A hammer icon means an opportunity to quickly modify the code at the caret. It is entirely optional. If you do want to make changes, press Alt+Enter to see context actions available to help you quickly change symbol visibility, add code that iterates over a collection, and more.

• Even if there are no action indicators in view, can also press Alt+Enter to quickly find and execute any JetBrains Rider action in scope. Just start typing and choose from the matches that appear:

Refactor code

JetBrains Rider provides many more refactorings than Visual Studio does, but even more importantly, its refactorings are significantly more usable and wider in scope while still being safe to use.

Memorizing all the refactorings and their shortcuts is not an easy task, but luckily you don’t have to. You can simply press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+T on any symbol in your code to see which refactorings are available for that symbol.

Generate code

To help you focus on non-trivial tasks, JetBrains Rider provides a lot of features for generating boilerplate code automatically. For example, you can call a non-existent method and JetBrains Rider will create this method based on the call, taking into account the return type and the types of arguments.

Generate type members

When your caret is anywhere within a type declaration, press Alt+Insert. In the popup menu that opens, select an item that you want to generate for the type. JetBrains Rider can create constructors, properties, overriding members, and more. For more information, refer to Code generation.

Code style matters

With JetBrains Rider, you can control most of the style aspects in your code, including naming standards, formatting rules, order of members in files and types, and many other tiny things (such as order of modifiers or whether to use the 'var' keyword).

The default values of JetBrains Rider code style features reflect Microsoft guidelines and numerous best practices. At the same time, you can adjust every tiny aspect of code style to fit your personal or corporate preferences.

To apply code style rules, press Ctrl+R, C. JetBrains Rider will run code cleanup with one of the default profiles (Full Cleanup, Reformat & Apply Syntax Style and Reformat Code) .