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XCode is the #1 reason I was never able to fully commit to a Mac. Hell, I was a Mac beta tester back in '83! (At age 17.) I've owned one, and used them as my ma

XCode is the #1 reason I was never able to fully commit to a Mac. Hell, I was a Mac beta tester back in '83! (At age 17.) I've owned one, and used them as my main email machine for decades, but I never could wrap my head around the IDE poverty that is XCode. Even when I wrote Mac software, I did not use XCode, or whatever they called it back then. These days, I still have a Mac for email and it is my main system for personal web surfing, but any and all technology development takes place on some flavor of Windows or Linux. Plus, my $350 gaming desktop PC was easily upgraded to 32GB RAM and 3 4K displays - Apple can't touch that, and the entire system, counting monitors, was under $2K.

jungturk 10y ago
I'm confused why the presence of Xcode would prevent one from using a Mac with whatever IDE they preferred. Atom, IntelliJ, VSCode, Sublime, VIM, etc... all work just fine on Macs.
- phaed 10y ago
  Call me when "brew install visualstudio" works.
  - kristiandupont 10y ago
    https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/ https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-mac/ ..of course it won't help you with c++ development.
- hellofunk 10y ago
  You are correct. You don't need Xcode for all the code you write for Apple's platforms. You need it to build and link to Apple libraries or the App Store, but you can edit code elsewhere.
  - slededit 10y ago
    You can compile and link without XCode too. Apple just makes it annoying to do so, and the documentation frequently says the equivalent of "just use XCode".
    - PetahNZ 10y ago
      "Apple just makes it annoying to do so" case in point
      - hellofunk 10y ago
        But this has nothing to do with actually editing your code; the majority of the iOS code I write and compile does not depend on Xcode or any of its utilities.