I think JetBrains has a XCode replacement but I dont do Apple development so I'm not sure if its possible to use it as a complete replacement for developing macOS, iOS and IPadOS apps. Anyone have first hand experience?
AppCode. I used to use it a lot, and in many respects it's just plain better than Xcode. You can one-click install a plugin to use vim bindings, for example, whereas in Xcode you have to strip out the code signature so that you can install a third party plugin for vim bindings because, I don't know, fuck you I guess.
The problem was that AppCode was always a few months behind Xcode in terms of Swift support, and Interface Builder never really worked right. So the workflow was to have them both open at the same time and constantly switch back and forth, which at the end of the day just isn't great.
I wish Xcode didn't suck, but it does in so many ways. Not much to be done about it.
I wish Jetbrains could do what they did with .NET which is Resharper. A plugin for Visual Studio that brought IntelliJ like features and smartness to it. It was a breeze.
Unfortunately I don't think XCode is built to handle third party vendors plugins and it never will (which is why Appcode exists in the first place).
Xcode used to allow plugins but then disabled them in favor of relatively useless Source Editor extensions which offers nowhere near the capability required to build something like R#.
A stand-alone IDE like AppCode is the way forward, JetBrains usually take a while to get their new IDE's up to speed and catch up with the latest language & platform features, but afterwards is able to add a tonne of smarts and maintain feature parity fairly quickly as they've done with Rider which offers a much nicer & faster UX than VS.NET/R#.
Every time I upgrade Visual Studio I try running it without Resharper. I’m finding I can last longer before I give in each time but I always do end up installing it.
I tried using AppCode on our massive project at work (several million lines of code), and at the time (admittedly a few years ago), I couldn't even start working on any code until it indexed the entire project. I let it run while on a machine I wasn't using and it took several hours to complete. Xcode also takes hours to complete indexing on our project, but it runs in the background instead of blocking the UI so I could get to work immediately with a new checkout of the source.
As I say, it's been a few years, but if I recall, it just generally didn't feel like a Mac application. It worked alright and was basically calling the same tools under-the-hood as Xcode does. But there was nothing compelling about it that I could see when I tested it. Perhaps it's better now? I should probably give it another look.
The problem was that AppCode was always a few months behind Xcode in terms of Swift support, and Interface Builder never really worked right. So the workflow was to have them both open at the same time and constantly switch back and forth, which at the end of the day just isn't great.
I wish Xcode didn't suck, but it does in so many ways. Not much to be done about it.