> People always ask me this when I complain about xcode and I don't understand where they're coming from. Have you developed apps for Linux or Windows? Yes. Fo

> People always ask me this when I complain about xcode and I don't understand where they're coming from. Have you developed apps for Linux or Windows? Yes. For many years. And those platforms also require you to install the toolchains for your target platforms. On macOS those toolchains come with a IDE, but there's no need nor requirement to use it. As demonstrated by large numbers of Mac devs using emacs, vim, vscode, etc all of which use a separately installed toolchain on every platform. On your various linux systems you're using apt-get or similar to install the toolchains and SDKs, on windows you're having to download and install them as well (historically having to pay for the toolchain as part of MSVC or such, but I assume that that's no longer the case). > You don't need to use a specific IDE to sign your code, I can tell you that much. You don't need to use Xcode to do that either, you can think of it as the dev tools also include a UI you can use, but can also ignore. codesign -s "MY Certificate Here" my.app No one is forced to use Xcode. The various SDKs and toolchains needed to develop for apple platforms are all included in a single bundle that is labeled Xcode.app, but what you are downloading is by an large just the toolchains and SDKs on a pure "what are the bulk of the bytes for" sense. > Well, I haven't met one. All of the iOS developers I know tell me "Yeah, it's a weird bird, but you gotta learn it". Have you experienced otherwise? Yes, that's literally what I said. It's also the IDE I've tended to prefer over the years, easily better than MSVC in my experience, but again that could be because I've learned and prefer Xcode to MSVC. OTOH I was also using MSVC a long time prior to Xcode so I didn't arrive at Xcode with no prior IDE experience. > > Having spent plenty of time dealing with > Well let's all stop discussing the relative merits of things, olliej has spoken about what's good or bad. Everyone else's thoughts and opinions are meaningless. While I agree I should have said "in my opinion Xcode is better than msvc", but I also didn't say any one else's thoughts and opinions were meaningless. In fact the whole crux of my comment was that you were passing your dislike of Xcode as though it were objective fact rather than an opinion. > > Signing apps is not drudge work, but also is not hard. > Shrug Difference of opinion, I guess. see above, it's a single command line that you can put in a makefile or whatever.