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Man I wish Xcode was a decent IDE
by nanagojo 6y ago
Man I wish Xcode was a decent IDE
- an_opabinia 6y agoIf there's anything you can credit the Google team for, it's using IntelliJ as the basis of the Android IDE.
- pjmlp 6y agoWhich is one of the reasons I am happy not having to deal with it every single day. Android Studio requires a gaming rig to run properly, Android developer forums are filled with discussions on how to not use it in pain.
- jolux 6y agoIntelliJ is amazing though.
- Aaargh20318 6y agoI would have preferred them sticking with Eclipse. Sure, the Android plugins for Eclipse were pretty bad, but that was all Googles fault. They could have just fixed their plugins.
- Jakobeha 6y agoI used Xcode recently and it's gotten a lot better. It's still not as good as IntelliJ or AppCode but it's usable. I remember around when Swift came out, Xcode was so bad that I couldn't even use it because typing was ~1 character/second and it would crash every few minutes. It's definitely recovered from that and I can actually type without lag now.
- pavlov 6y agoXcode had no such problems with Objective-C though... Maybe Swift's design deserves some blame here for years of subpar developer experience.
- myko 6y agoIt wasn't until Swift came out that autocomplete for ObjC in Xcode finally started to function at a useful level. Autocomplete in Swift is still broken but I don't think it's an issue with the language itself (autocomplete is probably easier to implement in Swift given the nature of the language).
- spideymans 6y agoThe autocomplete and syntax highlighting feature completely stops working sometimes. It’s beyond frustrating
- jondwillis 6y agoSimply: CMD+, Locations Derived Data CMD+Q Xcode Delete!!! Derived Data Restart Xcode Why not Clean Build Folder CMD+B success!!
- saagarjha 6y agoI have a source editor extension that has no job but to clean this clean this ;)
- ninkendo 6y agoI have a shell alias for mv ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData ~ && rm -rf ~/DerivedData & And I use it constantly. This approach is fast because it does the actual rm in the background so I can relaunch Xcode right away.
- akkawwakka 6y agoManipulating the source code leads to invoking the Swift compiler to generate the information required to drive the rich editing experience. I have found SourceKit’s performance in complex projects, especially those where there are a lot of third-party libraries or frameworks you’re linking against, to be pretty disappointing. Especially when you’re working with many ObjC dependencies. Like many of Apple’s developer tools, if you stick to the happy path, performance is great. Practically that means compiling your source into a single Swift module and keeping the number of modules low. If you are a “basic” iOS or macOS app with just a couple of 3p libraries things work great. Real world projects are drastically more messy...
- socialdemocrat 6y agoSounds like an unusual problem. I cannot remember having that problem and I was using Swift from the beginning. For me Xcode is quite nice. Didn’t like AppCode. Not sure why people are so enthusiastic about it. What does it give besides better code completion? Development is a lot more than code completion.
- Austin_Conlon 6y agoYou're hardly the only one, 3.3/5 star rating on the Mac App Store and the #1 downloaded developer tool. Can't live with it, can't live without it.
- arthurcolle 6y agoI think JetBrains has a XCode replacement but I dont do Apple development so I'm not sure if its possible to use it as a complete replacement for developing macOS, iOS and IPadOS apps. Anyone have first hand experience?
- mikenew 6y agoAppCode. I used to use it a lot, and in many respects it's just plain better than Xcode. You can one-click install a plugin to use vim bindings, for example, whereas in Xcode you have to strip out the code signature so that you can install a third party plugin for vim bindings because, I don't know, fuck you I guess. The problem was that AppCode was always a few months behind Xcode in terms of Swift support, and Interface Builder never really worked right. So the workflow was to have them both open at the same time and constantly switch back and forth, which at the end of the day just isn't great. I wish Xcode didn't suck, but it does in so many ways. Not much to be done about it.
- keyle 6y agoI wish Jetbrains could do what they did with .NET which is Resharper. A plugin for Visual Studio that brought IntelliJ like features and smartness to it. It was a breeze. Unfortunately I don't think XCode is built to handle third party vendors plugins and it never will (which is why Appcode exists in the first place).
- mythz 6y agoXcode used to allow plugins but then disabled them in favor of relatively useless Source Editor extensions which offers nowhere near the capability required to build something like R#. A stand-alone IDE like AppCode is the way forward, JetBrains usually take a while to get their new IDE's up to speed and catch up with the latest language & platform features, but afterwards is able to add a tonne of smarts and maintain feature parity fairly quickly as they've done with Rider which offers a much nicer & faster UX than VS.NET/R#.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoMe too. I don’t understand how they release an IDE without Vim emulation or some support for plugins that enable Vim emulation. It’s quite miserable. Last time I checked you had to root the app to install a Vim extension.
- saagarjha 6y ago*unsign the app
- plorkyeran 6y agoRe-sign the app using your own certificate.
- jamil7 6y agoFWIW you can invoke SourceKit LSP with a vim/nvim plugin now and have a really nice Swift editor inside nvim. It doesn’t work with third-party packages yet though so I mostly use it for one off scripts.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoThanks. Didn't know about SourceKit LSP.
- Grustaf 6y agoSo weird. I guess it might be because 99.9% of swift developers want as little vim as possible in their lives.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y agoWhat’s the connection between swift and Vim? Why would they be anti-Vim?
- Grustaf 6y agoMost people are naturally anit-vim, because it’s so unintuitive to the uninitiated. It’s not because they use swift.
- ridiculous_fish 6y agoCurious what your issues are? I personally love Xcode for C++.
- jamil7 6y agoA lot of the issues I encounter are mostly related to Swift and SourceKit more than they are Xcode. The language server will start choking after a mildly complex project and highlighting and autocomplete will stop working. Sometimes it won’t recover until you delete derived data. Xcode itself is missing some modern features for navigation and a plug-in system however. I’d also like it if the Xcode team could learn what software patches are rather than releasing an 11gb version for every update.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoOdd, I don’t really like IDEs but I think Xcode is among the least shitty IDEs out there. Too many IDEs have just terrible GUI design.
- bromuro 6y agoSame here - I like working with XCode because the native UI!
- user-the-name 6y agoYeah, Xcode has some annoying bugs occasionally but in terms of UX, it's miles ahead of anything else I've used.
- ninkendo 6y agoXcode’s main issues are its bugs (which are inexcusable) and the project file format which is way too hard to work with. Why aren’t files in groups sorted by default? Why does sorting them cause large sections of the project file to be rewritten? Why do I need to add files through the UI? (Why can’t I create them in the terminal and have them just show up?) I know that groups vs folder references play a role here but most projects use groups, and groups are a terrible experience. It all leads to constant merge conflicts and files just accidentally getting removed from groups and nobody being able to tell in code review. They need to fix the project file.
- Grustaf 6y agoInstead of an excellent one you mean?
- mmargerum 6y agoXcode is so dammed slow and buggy. I use JetBrains AppCode for everything but storyboard editing.
- read_if_gay_ 6y agoDoes AppCode support live preview?