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Using 2 Editors Because Xcode Is Dumb

84 points by ingve 2y ago

nntwozz 2y ago
Xcode feels like using a chainsaw to give someone a haircut. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HAv8CUpRDbA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HAv8CUpRDbA
jessekv 2y ago
I remember reading a positive xcode review on the app store that was something to the effect of: "so much better than the next one!"
trollied 2y ago
Could have spent the time filing a feedback request/radar instead of writing a blog post.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  That’s a good joke. Radars appear to be largely ignored.
- viraptor 2y ago
  Radar is where the reports die. I'd be amazed if Apple engineers didn't know about the thousands of things broken in Xcode. I can crash it in minutes just adding/removing controls and constraints. It shows there's minimal testing and even crash reports are ignored. I have a 2 years old trivially reproducible "whole system crashes" feedback submission which doesn't get fixed.
  - ninkendo 2y ago
    Apple has a culture of ignoring bugs and just working on features. The software program org decides what is going to happen for the next release, and engineers are assigned, and no resources are left to fix any existing bugs. The idea is for there to be “zero bugs” by the time a release is done, but this really means “any remaining bugs are punted to the N+1 release”. But when the N+1 release comes around, the cycle repeats and the program org picks the next thing to do, and everyone forgets about all the bugs that were punted. Repeat forever. Engineers would kill for a “zero new features, let’s just fix bugs” release, but such a release would basically mean the program org has nothing to do, and the program org is in charge, so it never happens. They’ll mutter things like “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se, but the first step to fixing a problem is to admit you have one, and that will never happen. The whole thing is set up to produce worse software over time. It’s really really sad.
    - ghist 2y ago
      > “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se But they literally already did exactly that! http://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg http://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg
      - ninkendo 2y ago
        Trust me! I know. I know so hard. But that’s still the kind of thing they say. Everyone just up and forgot about snow leopard, or maybe they just see it as a failure if they had to do a snow leopard release (at least the program org would. The engineers would be throwing a party.)
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > They’ll mutter things like “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se It is actually wrong. Mac OS X wasn't on an annual schedule until after Steve Jobs died. For a time, the schedule was more or less every two years, so there were some WWDCs when Jobs had little or nothing new to announce about it.
  - internetter 2y ago
    Yeah, I don’t file bug reports anymore. I just write in the ticket “this is probably an Apple bug with XCode. Workaround:” and then go on with my life
  - hbn 2y ago
    It's confusing because I have to assume there's a sizeable amount of people using Xcode internally to develop Apple's own apps. I guess their voices aren't heard from the people dictating corporate priority.
    - walterbell 2y ago
      Apple awaits a new CEO.
- realusername 2y ago
  XCode is beyond broken, it doesn't need any feedback, anybody who uses it for more than 10 minutes can see it's awful. We know it, Apple knows it, everybody knows it. This software isn't in an "it would be cool to improve this" stage but something like "can it still be saved?" stage.
mhd 2y ago
And we're back to the roots of Project Builder, XCode's predecessor. Or, to be honest, early XCode versions, where a lot of editing was done in more stable/capable editors.
- pasc1878 2y ago
  And project builder produced understandable build files rather than opaque not very good XML. They were Makefiles albeit complex ones. So PB was more like CMake :(
simonbarker87 2y ago
One of the reasons I stopped iOS development was because of how clunky, slow, opaque and buggy Xcode is. I’m amazed people have the patience to work with it especially when coupled with Swift being so picky with terrible error messages and Apple’s awful developer docs.
- sampullman 2y ago
  It's been a while, but I remember splitting time between XCode and VScCode for iOS projects made it bearable. Apple docs aren't perfect but I found Swift to be enjoyable enough as long as you don't accidentally run afoul of type checker bugs.
- xigency 2y ago
  The thing that shocked me about doing Swift app development was despite all of the syntactic requirements for types and null-checking, the program would crash with runtime errors as if I were still using C.
joshstrange 2y ago
Xcode is trash and I’m very sad that JetBrains discounted AppCode. It made things bearable even if I still had to use Xcode for certain tasks. My biggest complaint with Xcode is speed. It’s feels incredibly laggy to me. Auto-complete is slow and error reporting is insanely slow. I hope you like typing code and then 5-30 seconds later the IDE shows an error (normally a bad one). I’ve never had a good experience writing code in Xcode. Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on.
- danuker 2y ago
  Perhaps JetBrains should reconsider AppCode, since Xcode only got this crappy recently. Apparently they didn't get the market share they had hoped for. https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-release-and-end-of-sales-and-support/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...
  - wruza 2y ago
    Xcode only got this crappy recently It gets exponentially more crappy every time, which creates an impression that it only got crappy recently. I remember it doing this since 2010. The usual counter is to stay on the same version until either of you is literally dead. Although I didn’t find AppCode more useful for my simple tasks. If anything, it felt android-ish in ux, if you know what I mean.
    - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
      > It gets exponentially more crappy every time On which ratio scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_sca... ) do you define/measure "crappiness" so that you can say that "crappiness" grows exponentially? ;-)
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    > since Xcode only got this crappy recently I've always felt like it was slow and annoying to use personally. At least coming from the IntelliJ world, maybe if you were only in Xcode it was pretty decent until recently.
wilkystyle 2y ago
I am not an iOS/macOS developer, but I resonated strongly with this post because it captures how I feel the general experience of upgrading Apple OSes has been over the past few years: With each update, I find myself asking, what is going to be broken that used to simply "just work"? I'm not talking about controversial new design directions like the iOS photos app redesign, I mean broken behavior. I can't recall everything off the top of my head, but just a few examples that come to mind: - The new macOS has a system info pop-up every time any application is using your screen. It tells you how many times the application has accessed your audio or video over the last month, and tells you that you can manage this in settings. You cannot turn this notification off, and it is repeatedly triggered every few seconds by applications such as Zoom. This popup sometimes (but not always) steals application focus, which means if I am screensharing a code editor, keystrokes will inexplicably stop being sent to it. - In a recent version of iOS, I could no longer tap on the calendar event time-selection wheel while creating an event to manually type the time instead of spinning to select it. As soon as I started typing numbers, the UI would disappear and only a partial time would be entered. In the most recent version of iOS this has been fixed, but for a while the entire workflow of how I create calendar events was broken. - I used to be able to ask Siri to create an alarm for X minutes from now, but an update or two back Siri started creating timers instead. - For a few prior iOS versions, I would reduce volume or brightness in the iOS control center, only to have the sliders pop back up from time to time on their own. The general feeling of using iOS and macOS lately is that I can no longer rely on things continuing to behave the way they used to. Although macOS is a far better operating system experience than Windows, and far more polished than Linux on the desktop, it just feels like the reliable usability of Apple operating systems is slowly ebbing away. Maybe this is a sign that I'm turning into a curmudgeonly old graybeard in my middle age.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dsego 2y ago
  I am not sure if my mind is playing tricks on me or sometimes with some apps the focus doesn't work right. Like desktop Whatsapp looks to be in focus, but when I try typing nothing happens, than I need to click on it or restart it before I can type into the message box, but one time I managed to rename a folder on my desktop (and only realized this much later). One of the downsides of the macos windowing system allowing active apps without any windows shown. I'm scared I will delete something important or do damage if I can't be sure my mental model maps correctly to what's happening on the computer.
st3fan 2y ago
I am pretty sure that projects Package.json is incorrect. The demo app should be listed in the package targets as an executableTarget. In the Sources folder there should be a sub folder for Demo and for Library. Now when you ask swift package to generate the Xcode project (it should not be in the repo) it will properly organize it all.
lawgimenez 2y ago
I use both Xcode and Android Studio as my day job, I enjoy coding more on the latter. Even a simple git switch will break Xcode's project build, it's insane.
- promiseofbeans 2y ago
  I've been super impressed by Android Studio overall - it works way better than any other platform-specific fork of a popular editor I've used (looking at you, Arduino). XCode is a waste of my time - it's slow, buggy, and the errors are useless if they decide to ever show up. With all the "ai text editor" startups we've seen, someone just needs to find a way to hack the XCode build & emulator functionality into a useable editor, and they'll have thousands of paying users in a week.
  - dcow 2y ago
    Ah, but you’d have to use Xcode to build the editor… are you volunteering?
- trinix912 2y ago
  I used JetBrains AppCode until they killed it off. It was slower than Xcode, but felt way better to use than Xcode's text editor. Too bad they discontinued it, it probably wouldn't even be as slow on the M chips.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  At least XCode doesn't hang the machine indexing files, or requires 16 GB to be barely usable.
  - tartuffe78 2y ago
    And Xcode build failures usually tell you what's actually wrong, not some obscure Java/Gradle error you need to Google for 5 minutes to find the right stackoverflow post telling you which setting to change so it will build.
plagiarist 2y ago
Why deal with Xcode at all, then, if there is some LSP and a CLI build will work?
- feznyng 2y ago
  You definitely can get away with this but certain things like capabilities and signing necessitate using Xcode afaik.
  - joshstrange 2y ago
    You can manage that outside of Xcode using something like Fastlane but it's way easier in Xcode (well, kind of...).
0xferruccio 2y ago
XCode is so bad - Makes me not want to build iOS apps. If Apple swallowed some of their pride and just focused on providing a great developer experience via extensions for the editors people already use like VS Code and Vim IMO every developer would be thankful
- cynicalsecurity 2y ago
  It's a walled garden. They think they are making you a big favour of even allowing you inside of their garden / prison. Take it or leave it. Or support Open Source instead.
phreack 2y ago
XCode has always been such a disaster. I've been doing iOS dev on and off for over a decade and while the developer experience was not good at first, somehow it got consistently worse every year. Even know I have no idea what some unlabeled icons are supposed to mean and have to stumble and guess where critical tools are, discovery is just terrible. Friends who don't have to use it normally react "and people live like this?" when first seeing the kind of things you have to do in a regular daily workflow. I also decided very quickly to just use two editors way back then - Appcode first and then hilariously even Jetbrains gave up. Nowadays with fastlane I can luckily keep my XCode interactions to a minimum.
chuckadams 2y ago
I love the dickens out of the Mac hardware and even quite a few things even about the software. But Xcode for me is something homebrew and other language package managers need as a dependency for some packages, and that's all. Having tried again recently to use Xcode, it's still a joke of an IDE with an unfunny punchline.
- ericrallen 2y ago
  Just as a note, you can almost always get by with `xcode-select --install`[0] which installs the Xcode Command Line Tools, which is what `brew` et al. need. `brew` added this as a step in its install script[1], too. So, unless you are planning to do development in Xcode or want access to the device simulators for testing, there isn’t really much reason to actually install the Xcode application. [0]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107307/how-can-i-install-the-command-line-tools-completely-from-the-command-line https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107307/how-can-i-i... [1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/ee0036121331ff32d725df73476e37a4871439e2/install.sh#L846 https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/ee0036121331ff32d72...
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    I did want a device simulator at one point, so I installed the full thing. Then immediately installed VSCode so it could take over all the file associations that XCode took.
iamdamian 2y ago
I've tried many times to get into macOS/iOS programming, and Xcode is always the thing that has stopped me. It's a shame, because I really would like to build native apps...
deergomoo 2y ago
I’ve been (very) casually dabbling with iOS and Mac development on and off since about 2011, and the one constant has been that Xcode is incredibly janky. My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. Various versions would crash with alarming frequency. For years it was missing common text editing features like multiple cursors. Find and replace _still_ sucks, to this day. Since Swift came along, which I love as a language, type and error checking has become incredibly slow. A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. I’m doing Advent of Code in Swift this year and even for that—a couple dozen unconnected source files no more than 200 lines long each—I’ve had it refuse to rename files, breakpoints randomly stop working, Instruments refuse to let me edit configurations. Surely Apple’s own developers dogfood this all day every day and run into the exact same problems?
- trinix912 2y ago
  > My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. I had the exact same experience, and it was also a uni project :) Typing in Xcode also reminds me of VBA, where you'd only get the syntax highlighting for the line after completing it. Xcode regularly flashes it on-off for the entire file when typing. Quite an annoyance.
- didgeoridoo 2y ago
  > A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. This is MADDENING. I’ve had to comment out hundreds of lines of code across multiple files to get rid of error messages that were blocking Opt+click documentation from opening. This feels 100% inexcusable. (And if you do any SwiftUI development, get ready for a lot of “The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time” caused by a bog-standard parameter type mismatch. This is more excusable though, since SwiftUI seems to do unspeakably complicated things with generics and existentials so I could see things getting tangled up sometimes)
jtrueb 2y ago
Xcode is so slow and painful that I primarily use Cursor now to pseudo-lint, format, and generally edit. Switching over to Xcode just for the things that have to be done in Xcode. There is something wrong with the IDE if an LLM has better response times. Separately, Cursor Composer is awesome.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I think it's normal to have a backup editor. I do most of my coding with Jetbrains IDEs, but I have to edit a configuration file from time to time and for that I use vi. I know just a few percent of what vi can do, I use it as a command line "notepad". I feel safe running it under "sudo" or elevated with UAC and if I have to log into a strange Linux machine where I can't (package manager database corrupted -- that's why I'm there) or don't want to install software (it's not my machine) I can count on vi being there, my only beef is that I have to :syntax off because it's unusual to find a terminal where the dark blue shade can be read against a black background. (I installed emacs for old times sake on two Linux machines and remembered why I switched to vi. ^S for search was already a weird choice for the command line because of the XON-XOFF conflict, but ^S for save rolls off you fingers if you use GUI programs on Windows. I'm sure you can change it, but the continuation characters emacs uses interferes with cut-and-paste.)
pornel 2y ago
The worst thing is that Apple assumes everyone will use Xcode's GUI, and a lot of functionality is de-facto only available through Xcode. It doesn't seem like a standalone SDK with an IDE layered on top, quite the opposite, the CLI build tools feel like a headless Xcode runner. Building and code signing without Xcode is nearly impossible. The non-Xcode tooling is a disorganised half-deprecated bunch of ad-hoc commands, and they're mostly undocumented.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  A trait common to all platforms, with exception of UNIX ecosystem, and even then commercial UNIXes aren't as free choice as BSD/Linux clones.
  - roetlich 2y ago
    The most common end-user operating systems are Android and Windows, neither of those require a special GUI to create an app. You don't even need to buy specific hardware to write programs for those.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      Try to create native Android apps without Android Studio, or Windows native apps without Visual Studio tooling, by native meaning using the platform GUIs, SDKs, APIs and blessed tier 1 programming languages. Not trying to fit somethig that requires lots of yak shaving, and workarounds, to make it work without the vendors tooling. Native APIs from the platform, not stuff that abstracts the platform.
      - roetlich 2y ago
        How about using the vendor tooling? Here for example is the guide to running and building C# desktop Apps on MacOS: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/maui/first-app-tutorial/intro https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/maui/first-app-tuto... This is one of the blessed tier 1 languages, GUI made by the platform vendor, and using a collection of open-source cross platform SDKs from the platform vendor. Debugging on Windows if your customers are on Windows is probably more convenient, but people aren't using XCode for convenience, it's literally the only option to build any app. Also, what's with this moving of goal posts: > by native meaning To ship non-native Apps on iOS you still need XCode. > the platform GUIs You can't publish a CLI on iOS, and for non-platform GUIs you still need XCode. On all other mainstream platforms you can write a posix-compliant C program, and cross-platform it from almost any OS to almost any other OS. Android makes is a bit difficult to run CLI apps, but otherwise iOS is the one big exception to this, right? Don't you agree that iOS is a little bit different in that regard to other platforms? The only way to get around it is to pay someone else to run XCode for you. Or
eptcyka 2y ago
Xcode is the only IDE that I can crash by moving to a different branch. Rebasing with Xcode open thus is not stable. I can also crash it by trying to change a git SwiftPM dependency to a local one. Also, debugging over IP is cool. Until you work on a VPN. And you set that one cool flag that ensures there are no leaks. Which means the debugger traffic can no longer leak into your IDE. I have never seen a tool this janky, and I've been using lots of FOSS before.
dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago
I understand why some people use IDEs but I can't even imagine using them myself. The first thing is that you give up control and become a prisoner to the whims of the tool developers, who think "simplicity and elegance" is a four letter word. Needless complexity and severe bloat rules the day. 90% of features you won't ever use. A build configuration and process you, and everyone else, cannot fathom. Editor defaults that seem to be carefully designed to be unlike every other editor ever written. Arbitrary constraints on pretty much everything. Platform and language specifics throughout. I personally use Sublime Text because it's relatively simple, fast and programmable. It lets me build my process around the command line which is the only possible option for me. I guess most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos, but I make wide use of open source on multiple platforms, which means I have to use C/C++, Objective C/C++, Rust, Java, Python, Cython and Go (I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever) and support web, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and winOS. Even if you're not in my position, the platforms and languages you use very likely will change over time and maybe I'm old but it's nice when your development environment feels like your favorite old jeans or sneakers, not whatever the latest fashion in IDE corsets some team with apparently unlimited funding but very limited attention span has though up.
- david422 2y ago
  IntelliJ covers all those languages. I don't use 90% of the features but the other 10% are huge productivity increases.
- srik 2y ago
  I’ve found it impossible to write Objective C on a non-Xcode editor without losing my sanity; I don’t know how you do that.
- crossroadsguy 2y ago
  > most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos Ghetto is a very strong word. But fine. By the way, as I see it Python and JS folks are least known to be in IDE lock-ins. In fact non Android Java also to some extent is IDE agnostic. (I assume you were trying to make the counter point here? Anyway I took that. Having said that.. > I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever ..oh yes, could not have agreed more! :) Anyway, the thing is - people often have to use languages like Java (Kotlin) and ObjC (Swift) for a very specific use case and that is for Android and iOS and there is no easy way to not use the IDEs. God knows every Android developer has fantasised of the day when they can use the IDE of their choice and still every tooling around the setup works flawlessly. But then that's fantasy. Yes, people do use it if they want but that needs so much work that most people won't even think of going for it (and most people are those for whom development is a skill that earns money and is not a source of passion and joy if not source of resentment). > very likely will change over time No you are not very old and they do change. But that change is not at all difficult to catch up to. What I am trying to say is the IDEs, which suck (a lot of them, if not all), do life make easy in many ways and for teams/group actually have use-cases where one setups (with some changes or none) works for most and that is their use case. A lot of those setups are top-down. Coming right from Apples and Googles and JetBrains. Writing Kotlin/Java and ObjC/Swift in your favourite editor is bliss but writing it for iOS/Android is nightmare and then dealing with tooling around that if it's not THE IDE is a bigger nightmare. I am in my late 30s and I have learned that it is no big deal. Do I hate some of it aspects of and dislike further some of them? Fuck yeah. Are those deal breakers? Naah, far from it. It's okay. It works and gets the job done.
DannyBee 2y ago
Xcode is the reason i've never written true native mac apps. Ever. I program hobby stuff in lots of environments and languages depending on how i'm feeling. I have no trouble starting up Rider, PyCharm, Visual Studio, VSCode, whatever, and writing C#+Maui/Avalonia, Rust, Svelte+Tauri, Python+QT, etc. Whatever will work best for what i'm trying to do, or seems fun at the time. That's for regular coding, too. I have lots of PLC environments i work with for embedded stuff (Siemens, etc). I've learned lots of environments, and while they all have their issues, etc, they are all fairly usable pretty quickly, and stay that way. Meanwhile, every time i have ever sat down and tried to use XCode (a bunch of times over the past 10+ years), it is so annoying that i give up in a day or two and just go use something else. It's gotten progressively worse - it felt much easier to try 10 years ago than it does now. It is hard to describe how strange it feels to try to use it. I guess i'll go with "it often feels like it was created for use by some alien race specializing in industrial automation". It's not quite right, but i think it transfers some of the feeling. I honestly can't imagine how anyone uses it on a regular basis.
- prmph 2y ago
  Exactly, I swore off the whole native app development a long time ago, to preserve my sanity. Android development is also a mess. Meanwhile, there's still no really good way to development cross-platform desktop apps too. I'll just stick to the web, thank you. In my view the web is a special thing, and I really hope the industry does not neglect it and cause it to die. JS is getting better, but HTML is is serious need of a revamp to support rich UI apps.
deleted 2y ago
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frizlab 2y ago
As I commented already on the article I’m almost positive this article is straight up wrong. I understand bashing Xcode is cool, but please be accurate when doing so!
kibwen 2y ago
> An editor they can’t ruin: viewing a test file in Emacs Bold of you to think that Apple can't classify text editors, file access, and lisp interpreters as security risks and ban them from the platform. Apple makes their money from iPhone sales, they only suffer Mac users to exist because they happen to create iOS apps.
interactivecode 2y ago
Christian, have a look at how IceCubes [0] has their packages setup. We were having the same issues and copying their setup worked for us. [0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/ https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/
st3fan 2y ago
I'm going to make a bold claim here: Xcode and Swift Packages are actually pretty good! In my opinion what usually the real problem is, and this is a personal opinion based on a decade of working as an engineer and engineering manager on iOS projects, is that ... developers do not invest enough time to understand their tools. I'll say it again: developers do not invest enough time to understand their tools. It is always Xcode is crappy, complicated, broken, magical, dark magic, not documented. But here is the thing - I have dealt with a very large amount of issues like described in this post. Things around project structure, build logic, code signing, etc. And yes in the rare case it really did not work. But in 99% of the cases the developer who couldn't figure it out was just "trying random things until it worked" without actually understanding the tools. It is easier to shake the tree and see what falls out randomly than to take a step back and invest time in understanding a build system and then do the right thing. SHould it be easier? Yeah maybe. Is Xcode complicated, year sure. But it is part of your job as an engineer to understand the tools and the things they do. So invest time in it.
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sitzkrieg 2y ago
apple makes terrible software, full stop. it just gets worse
- robenkleene 2y ago
  Oh give me a break, Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Apple Notes, Apple Calendar, Contacts all of those apps I'd consider competitive for best in their category.
senordevnyc 2y ago
I make $500k / year working with Xcode. Yeah, it sucks, but reading these threads makes me feel some sick gratitude for that. I think I probably have more job security and market power than I'd have if iOS dev wasn't so horribly painful sometimes.
bogomog 2y ago
I never felt real comfortable with Xcode. Working on a medium sized c++ project now, and mostly using emacs. Xcode only for the debugger, which I much prefer in a GUI. CMake sets up the project, so low pain there. If on Windows, I would do the same but with Visual Studio. Usually I close the project when not debugging so I don't have 2 language servers running at once.
v0011d 2y ago
I like Xcode!

84 points by ingve 2y ago

Xcode feels like using a chainsaw to give someone a haircut. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HAv8CUpRDbA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HAv8CUpRDbA

jessekv 2y ago

I remember reading a positive xcode review on the app store that was something to the effect of: "so much better than the next one!"

trollied 2y ago

Could have spent the time filing a feedback request/radar instead of writing a blog post.

joshstrange 2y ago
That’s a good joke. Radars appear to be largely ignored.
viraptor 2y ago
Radar is where the reports die. I'd be amazed if Apple engineers didn't know about the thousands of things broken in Xcode. I can crash it in minutes just adding/removing controls and constraints. It shows there's minimal testing and even crash reports are ignored. I have a 2 years old trivially reproducible "whole system crashes" feedback submission which doesn't get fixed.
- ninkendo 2y ago
  Apple has a culture of ignoring bugs and just working on features. The software program org decides what is going to happen for the next release, and engineers are assigned, and no resources are left to fix any existing bugs. The idea is for there to be “zero bugs” by the time a release is done, but this really means “any remaining bugs are punted to the N+1 release”. But when the N+1 release comes around, the cycle repeats and the program org picks the next thing to do, and everyone forgets about all the bugs that were punted. Repeat forever. Engineers would kill for a “zero new features, let’s just fix bugs” release, but such a release would basically mean the program org has nothing to do, and the program org is in charge, so it never happens. They’ll mutter things like “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se, but the first step to fixing a problem is to admit you have one, and that will never happen. The whole thing is set up to produce worse software over time. It’s really really sad.
  - ghist 2y ago
    > “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se But they literally already did exactly that! http://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg http://ismh.s3.amazonaws.com/snow-leopard-0-new-features.jpg
    - ninkendo 2y ago
      Trust me! I know. I know so hard. But that’s still the kind of thing they say. Everyone just up and forgot about snow leopard, or maybe they just see it as a failure if they had to do a snow leopard release (at least the program org would. The engineers would be throwing a party.)
  - lapcat 2y ago
    > They’ll mutter things like “we can’t go on stage and just not announce any features”, which isn’t wrong per se It is actually wrong. Mac OS X wasn't on an annual schedule until after Steve Jobs died. For a time, the schedule was more or less every two years, so there were some WWDCs when Jobs had little or nothing new to announce about it.
- internetter 2y ago
  Yeah, I don’t file bug reports anymore. I just write in the ticket “this is probably an Apple bug with XCode. Workaround:” and then go on with my life
- hbn 2y ago
  It's confusing because I have to assume there's a sizeable amount of people using Xcode internally to develop Apple's own apps. I guess their voices aren't heard from the people dictating corporate priority.
  - walterbell 2y ago
    Apple awaits a new CEO.
realusername 2y ago
XCode is beyond broken, it doesn't need any feedback, anybody who uses it for more than 10 minutes can see it's awful. We know it, Apple knows it, everybody knows it. This software isn't in an "it would be cool to improve this" stage but something like "can it still be saved?" stage.

mhd 2y ago

And we're back to the roots of Project Builder, XCode's predecessor. Or, to be honest, early XCode versions, where a lot of editing was done in more stable/capable editors.

pasc1878 2y ago
And project builder produced understandable build files rather than opaque not very good XML. They were Makefiles albeit complex ones. So PB was more like CMake :(

simonbarker87 2y ago

One of the reasons I stopped iOS development was because of how clunky, slow, opaque and buggy Xcode is. I’m amazed people have the patience to work with it especially when coupled with Swift being so picky with terrible error messages and Apple’s awful developer docs.

sampullman 2y ago
It's been a while, but I remember splitting time between XCode and VScCode for iOS projects made it bearable. Apple docs aren't perfect but I found Swift to be enjoyable enough as long as you don't accidentally run afoul of type checker bugs.
xigency 2y ago
The thing that shocked me about doing Swift app development was despite all of the syntactic requirements for types and null-checking, the program would crash with runtime errors as if I were still using C.

joshstrange 2y ago

Xcode is trash and I’m very sad that JetBrains discounted AppCode. It made things bearable even if I still had to use Xcode for certain tasks. My biggest complaint with Xcode is speed. It’s feels incredibly laggy to me. Auto-complete is slow and error reporting is insanely slow. I hope you like typing code and then 5-30 seconds later the IDE shows an error (normally a bad one). I’ve never had a good experience writing code in Xcode. Often I’ll just open the files in IDEA to have sane hotkeys, my plugins, multiple cursors, and the list goes on and on and on.

danuker 2y ago
Perhaps JetBrains should reconsider AppCode, since Xcode only got this crappy recently. Apparently they didn't get the market share they had hoped for. https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-release-and-end-of-sales-and-support/ https://blog.jetbrains.com/appcode/2022/12/appcode-2022-3-re...
- wruza 2y ago
  Xcode only got this crappy recently It gets exponentially more crappy every time, which creates an impression that it only got crappy recently. I remember it doing this since 2010. The usual counter is to stay on the same version until either of you is literally dead. Although I didn’t find AppCode more useful for my simple tasks. If anything, it felt android-ish in ux, if you know what I mean.
  - aleph_minus_one 2y ago
    > It gets exponentially more crappy every time On which ratio scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_measurement#Ratio_sca... ) do you define/measure "crappiness" so that you can say that "crappiness" grows exponentially? ;-)
- joshstrange 2y ago
  > since Xcode only got this crappy recently I've always felt like it was slow and annoying to use personally. At least coming from the IntelliJ world, maybe if you were only in Xcode it was pretty decent until recently.

wilkystyle 2y ago

I am not an iOS/macOS developer, but I resonated strongly with this post because it captures how I feel the general experience of upgrading Apple OSes has been over the past few years: With each update, I find myself asking, what is going to be broken that used to simply "just work"? I'm not talking about controversial new design directions like the iOS photos app redesign, I mean broken behavior. I can't recall everything off the top of my head, but just a few examples that come to mind: - The new macOS has a system info pop-up every time any application is using your screen. It tells you how many times the application has accessed your audio or video over the last month, and tells you that you can manage this in settings. You cannot turn this notification off, and it is repeatedly triggered every few seconds by applications such as Zoom. This popup sometimes (but not always) steals application focus, which means if I am screensharing a code editor, keystrokes will inexplicably stop being sent to it. - In a recent version of iOS, I could no longer tap on the calendar event time-selection wheel while creating an event to manually type the time instead of spinning to select it. As soon as I started typing numbers, the UI would disappear and only a partial time would be entered. In the most recent version of iOS this has been fixed, but for a while the entire workflow of how I create calendar events was broken. - I used to be able to ask Siri to create an alarm for X minutes from now, but an update or two back Siri started creating timers instead. - For a few prior iOS versions, I would reduce volume or brightness in the iOS control center, only to have the sliders pop back up from time to time on their own. The general feeling of using iOS and macOS lately is that I can no longer rely on things continuing to behave the way they used to. Although macOS is a far better operating system experience than Windows, and far more polished than Linux on the desktop, it just feels like the reliable usability of Apple operating systems is slowly ebbing away. Maybe this is a sign that I'm turning into a curmudgeonly old graybeard in my middle age.

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dsego 2y ago
I am not sure if my mind is playing tricks on me or sometimes with some apps the focus doesn't work right. Like desktop Whatsapp looks to be in focus, but when I try typing nothing happens, than I need to click on it or restart it before I can type into the message box, but one time I managed to rename a folder on my desktop (and only realized this much later). One of the downsides of the macos windowing system allowing active apps without any windows shown. I'm scared I will delete something important or do damage if I can't be sure my mental model maps correctly to what's happening on the computer.

st3fan 2y ago

I am pretty sure that projects Package.json is incorrect. The demo app should be listed in the package targets as an executableTarget. In the Sources folder there should be a sub folder for Demo and for Library. Now when you ask swift package to generate the Xcode project (it should not be in the repo) it will properly organize it all.

lawgimenez 2y ago

I use both Xcode and Android Studio as my day job, I enjoy coding more on the latter. Even a simple git switch will break Xcode's project build, it's insane.

promiseofbeans 2y ago
I've been super impressed by Android Studio overall - it works way better than any other platform-specific fork of a popular editor I've used (looking at you, Arduino). XCode is a waste of my time - it's slow, buggy, and the errors are useless if they decide to ever show up. With all the "ai text editor" startups we've seen, someone just needs to find a way to hack the XCode build & emulator functionality into a useable editor, and they'll have thousands of paying users in a week.
- dcow 2y ago
  Ah, but you’d have to use Xcode to build the editor… are you volunteering?
trinix912 2y ago
I used JetBrains AppCode until they killed it off. It was slower than Xcode, but felt way better to use than Xcode's text editor. Too bad they discontinued it, it probably wouldn't even be as slow on the M chips.
pjmlp 2y ago
At least XCode doesn't hang the machine indexing files, or requires 16 GB to be barely usable.
- tartuffe78 2y ago
  And Xcode build failures usually tell you what's actually wrong, not some obscure Java/Gradle error you need to Google for 5 minutes to find the right stackoverflow post telling you which setting to change so it will build.

plagiarist 2y ago

Why deal with Xcode at all, then, if there is some LSP and a CLI build will work?

feznyng 2y ago
You definitely can get away with this but certain things like capabilities and signing necessitate using Xcode afaik.
- joshstrange 2y ago
  You can manage that outside of Xcode using something like Fastlane but it's way easier in Xcode (well, kind of...).

0xferruccio 2y ago

XCode is so bad - Makes me not want to build iOS apps. If Apple swallowed some of their pride and just focused on providing a great developer experience via extensions for the editors people already use like VS Code and Vim IMO every developer would be thankful

cynicalsecurity 2y ago
It's a walled garden. They think they are making you a big favour of even allowing you inside of their garden / prison. Take it or leave it. Or support Open Source instead.

phreack 2y ago

XCode has always been such a disaster. I've been doing iOS dev on and off for over a decade and while the developer experience was not good at first, somehow it got consistently worse every year. Even know I have no idea what some unlabeled icons are supposed to mean and have to stumble and guess where critical tools are, discovery is just terrible. Friends who don't have to use it normally react "and people live like this?" when first seeing the kind of things you have to do in a regular daily workflow. I also decided very quickly to just use two editors way back then - Appcode first and then hilariously even Jetbrains gave up. Nowadays with fastlane I can luckily keep my XCode interactions to a minimum.

chuckadams 2y ago

I love the dickens out of the Mac hardware and even quite a few things even about the software. But Xcode for me is something homebrew and other language package managers need as a dependency for some packages, and that's all. Having tried again recently to use Xcode, it's still a joke of an IDE with an unfunny punchline.

ericrallen 2y ago
Just as a note, you can almost always get by with `xcode-select --install`[0] which installs the Xcode Command Line Tools, which is what `brew` et al. need. `brew` added this as a step in its install script[1], too. So, unless you are planning to do development in Xcode or want access to the device simulators for testing, there isn’t really much reason to actually install the Xcode application. [0]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107307/how-can-i-install-the-command-line-tools-completely-from-the-command-line https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/107307/how-can-i-i... [1]: https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/ee0036121331ff32d725df73476e37a4871439e2/install.sh#L846 https://github.com/Homebrew/install/blob/ee0036121331ff32d72...
- chuckadams 2y ago
  I did want a device simulator at one point, so I installed the full thing. Then immediately installed VSCode so it could take over all the file associations that XCode took.

iamdamian 2y ago

I've tried many times to get into macOS/iOS programming, and Xcode is always the thing that has stopped me. It's a shame, because I really would like to build native apps...

deergomoo 2y ago

I’ve been (very) casually dabbling with iOS and Mac development on and off since about 2011, and the one constant has been that Xcode is incredibly janky. My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. Various versions would crash with alarming frequency. For years it was missing common text editing features like multiple cursors. Find and replace _still_ sucks, to this day. Since Swift came along, which I love as a language, type and error checking has become incredibly slow. A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. I’m doing Advent of Code in Swift this year and even for that—a couple dozen unconnected source files no more than 200 lines long each—I’ve had it refuse to rename files, breakpoints randomly stop working, Instruments refuse to let me edit configurations. Surely Apple’s own developers dogfood this all day every day and run into the exact same problems?

trinix912 2y ago
> My first time was for a university project that I almost missed the deadline for because my app just refused to build one day, regardless of clearing all the caches etc. I eventually fixed that by starting a new project and copying all the files over. I had the exact same experience, and it was also a uni project :) Typing in Xcode also reminds me of VBA, where you'd only get the syntax highlighting for the line after completing it. Xcode regularly flashes it on-off for the entire file when typing. Quite an annoyance.
didgeoridoo 2y ago
> A type error somewhere in a file often completely breaks the ability to Opt+click any other types to read the very documentation you need to fix the error. Clicking related types often opens a “not found” page in the documentation explorer. This is MADDENING. I’ve had to comment out hundreds of lines of code across multiple files to get rid of error messages that were blocking Opt+click documentation from opening. This feels 100% inexcusable. (And if you do any SwiftUI development, get ready for a lot of “The compiler is unable to type-check this expression in reasonable time” caused by a bog-standard parameter type mismatch. This is more excusable though, since SwiftUI seems to do unspeakably complicated things with generics and existentials so I could see things getting tangled up sometimes)

jtrueb 2y ago

Xcode is so slow and painful that I primarily use Cursor now to pseudo-lint, format, and generally edit. Switching over to Xcode just for the things that have to be done in Xcode. There is something wrong with the IDE if an LLM has better response times. Separately, Cursor Composer is awesome.

PaulHoule 2y ago

I think it's normal to have a backup editor. I do most of my coding with Jetbrains IDEs, but I have to edit a configuration file from time to time and for that I use vi. I know just a few percent of what vi can do, I use it as a command line "notepad". I feel safe running it under "sudo" or elevated with UAC and if I have to log into a strange Linux machine where I can't (package manager database corrupted -- that's why I'm there) or don't want to install software (it's not my machine) I can count on vi being there, my only beef is that I have to :syntax off because it's unusual to find a terminal where the dark blue shade can be read against a black background. (I installed emacs for old times sake on two Linux machines and remembered why I switched to vi. ^S for search was already a weird choice for the command line because of the XON-XOFF conflict, but ^S for save rolls off you fingers if you use GUI programs on Windows. I'm sure you can change it, but the continuation characters emacs uses interferes with cut-and-paste.)

pornel 2y ago

The worst thing is that Apple assumes everyone will use Xcode's GUI, and a lot of functionality is de-facto only available through Xcode. It doesn't seem like a standalone SDK with an IDE layered on top, quite the opposite, the CLI build tools feel like a headless Xcode runner. Building and code signing without Xcode is nearly impossible. The non-Xcode tooling is a disorganised half-deprecated bunch of ad-hoc commands, and they're mostly undocumented.

pjmlp 2y ago
A trait common to all platforms, with exception of UNIX ecosystem, and even then commercial UNIXes aren't as free choice as BSD/Linux clones.
- roetlich 2y ago
  The most common end-user operating systems are Android and Windows, neither of those require a special GUI to create an app. You don't even need to buy specific hardware to write programs for those.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    Try to create native Android apps without Android Studio, or Windows native apps without Visual Studio tooling, by native meaning using the platform GUIs, SDKs, APIs and blessed tier 1 programming languages. Not trying to fit somethig that requires lots of yak shaving, and workarounds, to make it work without the vendors tooling. Native APIs from the platform, not stuff that abstracts the platform.
    - roetlich 2y ago
      How about using the vendor tooling? Here for example is the guide to running and building C# desktop Apps on MacOS: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/maui/first-app-tutorial/intro https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/maui/first-app-tuto... This is one of the blessed tier 1 languages, GUI made by the platform vendor, and using a collection of open-source cross platform SDKs from the platform vendor. Debugging on Windows if your customers are on Windows is probably more convenient, but people aren't using XCode for convenience, it's literally the only option to build any app. Also, what's with this moving of goal posts: > by native meaning To ship non-native Apps on iOS you still need XCode. > the platform GUIs You can't publish a CLI on iOS, and for non-platform GUIs you still need XCode. On all other mainstream platforms you can write a posix-compliant C program, and cross-platform it from almost any OS to almost any other OS. Android makes is a bit difficult to run CLI apps, but otherwise iOS is the one big exception to this, right? Don't you agree that iOS is a little bit different in that regard to other platforms? The only way to get around it is to pay someone else to run XCode for you. Or

eptcyka 2y ago

Xcode is the only IDE that I can crash by moving to a different branch. Rebasing with Xcode open thus is not stable. I can also crash it by trying to change a git SwiftPM dependency to a local one. Also, debugging over IP is cool. Until you work on a VPN. And you set that one cool flag that ensures there are no leaks. Which means the debugger traffic can no longer leak into your IDE. I have never seen a tool this janky, and I've been using lots of FOSS before.

dkjaudyeqooe 2y ago

I understand why some people use IDEs but I can't even imagine using them myself. The first thing is that you give up control and become a prisoner to the whims of the tool developers, who think "simplicity and elegance" is a four letter word. Needless complexity and severe bloat rules the day. 90% of features you won't ever use. A build configuration and process you, and everyone else, cannot fathom. Editor defaults that seem to be carefully designed to be unlike every other editor ever written. Arbitrary constraints on pretty much everything. Platform and language specifics throughout. I personally use Sublime Text because it's relatively simple, fast and programmable. It lets me build my process around the command line which is the only possible option for me. I guess most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos, but I make wide use of open source on multiple platforms, which means I have to use C/C++, Objective C/C++, Rust, Java, Python, Cython and Go (I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever) and support web, Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and winOS. Even if you're not in my position, the platforms and languages you use very likely will change over time and maybe I'm old but it's nice when your development environment feels like your favorite old jeans or sneakers, not whatever the latest fashion in IDE corsets some team with apparently unlimited funding but very limited attention span has though up.

david422 2y ago
IntelliJ covers all those languages. I don't use 90% of the features but the other 10% are huge productivity increases.
srik 2y ago
I’ve found it impossible to write Objective C on a non-Xcode editor without losing my sanity; I don’t know how you do that.
crossroadsguy 2y ago
> most people live in Java, Python or JavaScript ghettos Ghetto is a very strong word. But fine. By the way, as I see it Python and JS folks are least known to be in IDE lock-ins. In fact non Android Java also to some extent is IDE agnostic. (I assume you were trying to make the counter point here? Anyway I took that. Having said that.. > I draw the line at JavaScript, never ever ..oh yes, could not have agreed more! :) Anyway, the thing is - people often have to use languages like Java (Kotlin) and ObjC (Swift) for a very specific use case and that is for Android and iOS and there is no easy way to not use the IDEs. God knows every Android developer has fantasised of the day when they can use the IDE of their choice and still every tooling around the setup works flawlessly. But then that's fantasy. Yes, people do use it if they want but that needs so much work that most people won't even think of going for it (and most people are those for whom development is a skill that earns money and is not a source of passion and joy if not source of resentment). > very likely will change over time No you are not very old and they do change. But that change is not at all difficult to catch up to. What I am trying to say is the IDEs, which suck (a lot of them, if not all), do life make easy in many ways and for teams/group actually have use-cases where one setups (with some changes or none) works for most and that is their use case. A lot of those setups are top-down. Coming right from Apples and Googles and JetBrains. Writing Kotlin/Java and ObjC/Swift in your favourite editor is bliss but writing it for iOS/Android is nightmare and then dealing with tooling around that if it's not THE IDE is a bigger nightmare. I am in my late 30s and I have learned that it is no big deal. Do I hate some of it aspects of and dislike further some of them? Fuck yeah. Are those deal breakers? Naah, far from it. It's okay. It works and gets the job done.

DannyBee 2y ago

Xcode is the reason i've never written true native mac apps. Ever. I program hobby stuff in lots of environments and languages depending on how i'm feeling. I have no trouble starting up Rider, PyCharm, Visual Studio, VSCode, whatever, and writing C#+Maui/Avalonia, Rust, Svelte+Tauri, Python+QT, etc. Whatever will work best for what i'm trying to do, or seems fun at the time. That's for regular coding, too. I have lots of PLC environments i work with for embedded stuff (Siemens, etc). I've learned lots of environments, and while they all have their issues, etc, they are all fairly usable pretty quickly, and stay that way. Meanwhile, every time i have ever sat down and tried to use XCode (a bunch of times over the past 10+ years), it is so annoying that i give up in a day or two and just go use something else. It's gotten progressively worse - it felt much easier to try 10 years ago than it does now. It is hard to describe how strange it feels to try to use it. I guess i'll go with "it often feels like it was created for use by some alien race specializing in industrial automation". It's not quite right, but i think it transfers some of the feeling. I honestly can't imagine how anyone uses it on a regular basis.

prmph 2y ago
Exactly, I swore off the whole native app development a long time ago, to preserve my sanity. Android development is also a mess. Meanwhile, there's still no really good way to development cross-platform desktop apps too. I'll just stick to the web, thank you. In my view the web is a special thing, and I really hope the industry does not neglect it and cause it to die. JS is getting better, but HTML is is serious need of a revamp to support rich UI apps.

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frizlab 2y ago

As I commented already on the article I’m almost positive this article is straight up wrong. I understand bashing Xcode is cool, but please be accurate when doing so!

kibwen 2y ago

> An editor they can’t ruin: viewing a test file in Emacs Bold of you to think that Apple can't classify text editors, file access, and lisp interpreters as security risks and ban them from the platform. Apple makes their money from iPhone sales, they only suffer Mac users to exist because they happen to create iOS apps.

interactivecode 2y ago

Christian, have a look at how IceCubes [0] has their packages setup. We were having the same issues and copying their setup worked for us. [0] https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/ https://github.com/Dimillian/IceCubesApp/

st3fan 2y ago

I'm going to make a bold claim here: Xcode and Swift Packages are actually pretty good! In my opinion what usually the real problem is, and this is a personal opinion based on a decade of working as an engineer and engineering manager on iOS projects, is that ... developers do not invest enough time to understand their tools. I'll say it again: developers do not invest enough time to understand their tools. It is always Xcode is crappy, complicated, broken, magical, dark magic, not documented. But here is the thing - I have dealt with a very large amount of issues like described in this post. Things around project structure, build logic, code signing, etc. And yes in the rare case it really did not work. But in 99% of the cases the developer who couldn't figure it out was just "trying random things until it worked" without actually understanding the tools. It is easier to shake the tree and see what falls out randomly than to take a step back and invest time in understanding a build system and then do the right thing. SHould it be easier? Yeah maybe. Is Xcode complicated, year sure. But it is part of your job as an engineer to understand the tools and the things they do. So invest time in it.

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sitzkrieg 2y ago

apple makes terrible software, full stop. it just gets worse

robenkleene 2y ago
Oh give me a break, Apple makes Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Apple Notes, Apple Calendar, Contacts all of those apps I'd consider competitive for best in their category.

senordevnyc 2y ago

I make $500k / year working with Xcode. Yeah, it sucks, but reading these threads makes me feel some sick gratitude for that. I think I probably have more job security and market power than I'd have if iOS dev wasn't so horribly painful sometimes.

bogomog 2y ago

I never felt real comfortable with Xcode. Working on a medium sized c++ project now, and mostly using emacs. Xcode only for the debugger, which I much prefer in a GUI. CMake sets up the project, so low pain there. If on Windows, I would do the same but with Visual Studio. Usually I close the project when not debugging so I don't have 2 language servers running at once.

v0011d 2y ago

I like Xcode!