I think IDE preference leans further towards subjective than many believe.
I find that IntelliJ IDEs are fine, but not nearly as amazing as they're often hyped up to be, and similarly while Xcode has problems it's not nearly as bad as is often claimed.
My experience is somewhat colored by Android Studio and JVM ecosystem stuff like gradle and proguard though, which have been more cumulative pain for me than anything Apple-side in a long time (Cocoapods was pretty gnarly but SwiftPM has fixed that).
Xcode 26.2 is a 2.1GB download, which expands to 8.63GB on disk, which includes the macOS SDK. The iOS SDK and simulators are another 8.38GB. Luckily Xcode versions can share iOS SDKs now, so you only need to install them once. Really the biggest disk eater is Xcode's default behavior of creating a huge set of simulators for every platform.
At 8.6gb of disk usage, they could include the entire macOS Mojave ISO disk image[0] and still have ~930 MB to include fit the IDE. It's just unprecedented.
You’re counting the development SDK against the IDE. Xcode itself doesn’t require that space, and you’d need that space regardless of IDE choice if you were targeting the platform.
Indeed, and unless that changed since, the Mac downloader isn't even capable of resuming downloads properly so if anything happens while you download these 13GB, it's back to square one.
You can't be serious, Xcode is the worse IDE I ever used, while Android Studio isn't great, it cannot be compared to that.
Xcode is so sluggish it's slower than an electron app despite being native, the xcode app upload is so broken even Apple released a third party tool to bypass their own IDE and its undocumented config files look like from the 90s and do not work well with git.
The UI is sort of okay but that's not going to cut it. You can feel the decades of cruft in this IDE, it feel like using Borland.
The UI is nice and I already know how to set up projects so it’s much better for me. The config files work perfectly fine with git, that’s where I put them.
I felt it was just very weird, kind of how I feel about Visual Studio Code versus other text editors. It was faster and probably had more features but I just felt like Eclipse was more pleasant in terms of UI (though understandably a little dated looking) and it was easier to customize it to something close to perfect for me.
I find that IntelliJ IDEs are fine, but not nearly as amazing as they're often hyped up to be, and similarly while Xcode has problems it's not nearly as bad as is often claimed.
My experience is somewhat colored by Android Studio and JVM ecosystem stuff like gradle and proguard though, which have been more cumulative pain for me than anything Apple-side in a long time (Cocoapods was pretty gnarly but SwiftPM has fixed that).