[stevetrewick]

I've been using XCode daily since version 3 and I still miss VS. XCode (IMO) is a festival of UX badness - can't change positions of navigator windows, can't change fonts/colors outside of source/console, the 'assistant' window (or whatever it's called this week) frequently opens up unexpected or unrelated files, refuses to stop trying to automatically balance square brackets, spews truncated errors and warnings over the top of code then shows a tiny version in a mouseover for about 3 seconds before hiding it, truncates said warnings in the issue navigator, tiny fonts almost everywhere, severe weirdness with variable inspection and no integrated 'watch' in the debugger - which likes to show disassembley even when you ask it not to.

Lack of refactoring support for Swift is currently baking my noodle, as is the lack of a supported plugin API (with which I could solve many of my own problems). Very crashy.

All that being said, it has a lot of good stuff. The analysis and profiling tools are great, there's a bunch of really powerful tools for games and 3D, view debugging is a thing now, the UI builder is super powerful (once you get used to it) and the unit/performance/UI testing tools are (IMO) pretty awesome. Lately integration with all things App Store (provisioning, entitlements, etc) has got a lot better and most of my pain points there have gone away.

It's hugely subjective though, some people would disagree with much of this. Like any IDE, you end up in a love/hate relationship. The main difference being that if you hate VS you can hit up the extensibility API and make your pain go away, whereas Apple don't really care if you hate them.*

*I'm aware of Alcatraz and it's neat, I'm just not quite sure I want to introduce unsupported hackery into my production environment.

[e28eta]

Does turning off the "Automatically balance brackets in Objective-C" preference not work? I like the feature, so I've never tried turning it off, but it sounds like it'd solve your problem.

You can also change the assistant editor to manual control: I frequently alternate between automatic, UI, and manual control of the right pane. There are some great keyboard controls to make it easier.

I don't use (need?) 'watch' in my debugging, but I thought the UI exposed a command for doing so (is that what you mean by integrated?). I think right clicking a value/variable has 'watch'. And I'm sure that LLDB has commands for it.

[vitd]

> Lack of refactoring support for Swift is currently baking my noodle,

Yeah, I hear the refactoring tools are great, but they don't work with C++ either, which is what most of my source-base is.

>as is the lack of a supported plugin API (with which I could solve many of my own problems).

I don't know if this would solve your problem, but you can tell Xcode to compile (or maybe handle is a better word) any type of file with a script. So if you want to compile your Haskell source with Xcode, for example, just go to the target settings, click on the "Build Rules" tab, and add a rule that says "Process files with names matching: " *.hs, and Using "Custom Script:" with a pointer to a script that runs the input file through ghc, or whatever you need.