[feelix]

>I’m thoroughly convinced that Apple has an internal-only IDE that they use that is far better than Xcode and is actually functional, much like the internal Radar tool.

That's an interesting point and it makes a lot of sense. With the scale of the codebases a lot of them are working on I also don't see how they could be productive while working in XCode. And also XCode could not be this buggy and broken if it had internal developers working with it and constantly reporting bugs.

[koverstreet]

The response from a friend who works at apple was laughter and "if only".

personally, I'm the kind of guy with a "vim 4 life" tattoo, so I don't really know why people put up with crappy IDEs...

[thought_alarm]

The experienced developers at Apple are no different than the experienced developers elsewhere. They use the LLDB command-line and write their code in Emacs.

I've never liked Visual Studio, and the last time I worked on a serious Windows product most of the experienced developers used WinDbg and cordbg rather than the neutered Visual Studio debugger. And some guys still wrote their code in Visual Studio 6 rather than the newer .NET IDEs.

My problem with Xcode today is that it's too much like Visual Studio. I'll take Xcode 3 with LLDB any day.

[makecheck]

Command-line tools are great but graphical displays can be useful, too. The real problem is that pane/window management on OSes is years behind where it should be.

What I want is a way to take any view I please, from any application, and arrange it anywhere in a standard way with keyboard support and sensible omissions of chrome. If this means 65% of my screen is terminals, 20% web browsers, 10% some graphical view from Xcode and 5% notifications, that should be perfect fine. Instead, the most the Mac has been able to cobble together is a simple split screen view and that is only for Full Screen.

And, we also have: Xcode with its own completely custom and quirky pane/tab management scheme, terminals with their own pane/tab scheme, browsers with their own tabs, etc. Individual applications continue to feel some need to over-engineer their own pane/window management to compensate for lack of system support.

There are some signs of hope though. The direction Apple is going with Mac view controllers could theoretically put them in a position to finally turn individual views into first-class citizens that would be feasible to interleave arbitrarily across applications. At that point, command-line tools could integrate very nicely in arbitrary ways with elements that really benefit from being graphical. We’ll see.

[dcgoss]

I have been using https://www.spectacleapp.com/ for a while now, and it has performed like a champ. Easy window resizing and organization with keyboard shortcuts.

[stephencanon]

vim. /ducks

[m4x]

How does it make a lot of sense? If Apple had a tool that was better than Xcode, why would they hide it from the public? They have proven themselves to be quite motivated to provide developers with good tools and frankly I find the idea that they keep a better tool hidden away ridiculous.

[feelix]

thought_alarm got it right. The experienced developers probably use open source editors / debuggers, unsuitable for the masses. Not an Apple-only tool, but still not XCode.