What is OmniSharp?
OmniSharp is an open-source software development kit (SDK) that provides Integrated Development Environment (IDE)-like capabilities for text editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). It was created by the .NET Foundation to bring a rich IDE experience to text editors like Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text, Atom, and Vim.
OmniSharp enables features like auto-completion, code formatting, refactoring, syntax highlighting, code navigation, and more for C# and .NET developers. It uses the Roslyn compiler platform to provide these features. Some of the key capabilities OmniSharp unlock for .NET developers include:
- Contextual auto-completion for C# code
- Real-time code analysis with error and warning highlighting
- Automatic formatting of code snippets to match C# style guidelines
- Ability to easily rename variables, methods, classes across entire codebases
- Finding references and usages of variables, methods and other symbols
- Syntax highlighting, bracket matching, and code folding
- Support for running .NET Core unit test frameworks like xUnit, NUnit and MSTest
By providing IDE-like assistance and productivity enhancements, OmniSharp allows .NET developers to be more productive even when using lightweight editors like Sublime Text, Vim or Visual Studio Code. It is a popular extension used by .NET developers on Visual Studio Code and has over 3 million downloads.