How to open several windows of JetBrains Rider

Background

When working in Rider IDE, it may be necessary to manage multiple solutions simultaneously. This article explains how to open different solutions in Rider without launching multiple instances of the IDE.

Question

How to open multiple solutions in Rider simultaneously?

Answer

By design, Rider is a single-instance application. IDE uses a set of directories to store its internal data (user data, recents project data, caches). It comes to the point that launching several standalone IDE instances of the same version (by launching Rider launcher) using a single set of IDE directories isn't possible. There is a related feature request: Allow multiple instances of IDEA to run at once Allow multiple instances of IDEA to run at once

If that is really necessary to launch several independent standalone IDE instances, see the "Note" at the bottom.

However, it is possible to open several different solutions at the same time:

1. Go to Settings → Appearance & Behavior → System Settings;

2. Find the Solution section;

3. In the Open project in setting, choose one of the following options:

   • New window: Opens the solution in a separate window.
   • Ask: Prompts you to choose between opening in a new window or the current one.

The available approaches for opening another project or solution in a new Rider Window are:

• Using File | Open in a running Rider instance
• By opening a new project file (.sln, .csproj, .uproject) via operating system's file manager
• Via command line: rider /Path/To/DirOrSlnFile

One can also open one of the recent projects:

• From the Projects tab in the Toolbox App

  

• By right-clicking on the Rider icon in the taskbar and selecting a project to open

• (On Windows) from the Start menu: find Rider entry in the Start menu and select a project from the list of recent projects

  

Note:

Meantime, there is a workaround how to launch several standalone independent Rider instances. See: How to launch the same Rider version multiple times as standalone processes?