[Someone]

They do, but search and replace, diffing, and copy-paste of multiple elements and their constraints likely (I haven't used Xcode's editor much, certainly not recently) do not work as well as their equivalent in text.

And of course, some people find markdown more user-friendly than a visual GUI for more or less the same reasons, so it should not be that surprising to find some people experiment with this.

And of course, autolayout has a text-based language of its own (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/UserEx...)

[schwarrrtz]

you can copy elements in interface builder, iirc. you can't copy their constraints, which makes sense because the copied instances necessarily have different constraints. otherwise the copies would just stack on top of each other.

in my personal opinion, IB is great for layout of one view or screen, especially with the new IBDesignable and IBInspectable features.

doing app navigation in a storyboard is a terrible idea and will lead to a monolithic storyboard file that is very annoying to work with.

[cellularmitosis]

Was going to say something similar, that IB is great if you are doing one-off screens, but it isn't the best for creating reusable / composable UI elements.

[sachadso]

couldn't agree more !