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by vrutberg 3404 days ago
As a developer who moved from Java and JavaScript (IntelliJ IDEA) to Swift and Xcode about a year ago, the experience has been horrendous. How is it okay for a company as big and serious as Apple to have an IDE and tooling as bad as Xcode? The IDE frequently crashes, there is no refactoring support at all, practically non-existant code completion, syntax highlightning frequently stops working, etc etc.
2 comments
wsc981 3404 days ago
I've been using Xcode for many, many years now. In the past (~8+ years ago) I've used Visual Studio.

From my perspective Xcode is a really nice IDE. I prefer the lean UI compared to Visual Studio and Xamarin. The only thing that annoys me is that since Swift the syntax colouring and autocompletion breaks multiple times a day. This is a slight annoyance for me, but otherwise I personally think it's a decent IDE.

I don't experience the crashes like you do. And I've never really used much refactoring tools in the past, so I guess I don't know what I am missing out on.

But you might want to consider AppCode from Jetbrains. Apparently it supports both Objective-C and Swift and it's refactoring support -at least- should be good.

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bartvk 3403 days ago
Yup, I agree. I think Xcode is not bad at all. I wouldn't call it great, but it's good enough. I get a hard crash every couple of weeks. Autocompletion breaks maybe 2 times a week, and this month, I haven't seen syntax colouring break.

It used to be worse, of course. Especially in Swift 1.x and 2.0.

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accatyyc 3404 days ago
What's worse... the refactor functionality for renaming used to be great, but when swift came along it stopped working for Objective-C as well...
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dep_b 3404 days ago
> the refactor functionality for renaming used to be great

Objective-C did have some basic tools. But even Eclipse was better?

You can always use AppCode, I believe it has the usual JetBrains level of refactoring. I have a copy paid and installed yet I almost never use it.

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manmal 3404 days ago
I can confirm, Appcode is good enough. Annoyingly, they don't manage to get font rendering to be the same as in Xcode, and that's a bigger issue for me than it should.
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