Using 2 Editors Because Xcode Is Dumb

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.

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.)

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.

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...

> 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.

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.

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.