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by 72deluxe 4023 days ago
What have you used instead? If you've used Visual Studio then it seems pretty bad to begin with. I used to use Codegear RAD Studio (C++ Builder) and that was OK until all the developers left and it became buggy, memory-hogging and generally bad.

XCode seems quite spartan compared to Visual Studio. VS will give you many panes left/right/bottom and a myriad of buttons to do things but xcode just gives you that pane on the left, and you will likely benefit from learning the cmd-1,2,3 etc. shortcuts to jump to the different pages of this "notebook". The other benefit if the quick navigation at the top, the useful "callers/callees" access from the "four squares" menu top left of the editing area. As someone else said, it has Instruments built straight in, the ability to monitor CPU/memory/disk and network and a much better thread stack view (xcode 5 was pretty bad with this I recall - you had to navigate using a popup menu).

You might get on differently with it if you're using different languages. I write C++ in it daily and I really enjoy it (clang is quick). The ability to do static code analysis and have it annotated in the editing window is really really really really great. Lack of refactoring with C++ is a bit sad but not a massive issue for me. Whenever I go back to using Visual Studio I find it to be clunky and there's too much on screen (popups, toolbars, etc.) but that's just me. Also, the glitching and artifacting when VS redraws is irritating (might just be a side effect of running in a VM for me), and the "stop build" takes too long thanks to the compiler running in a hidden window. I ought to upgrade to a more recent Visual Studio as I have to use VS2010 at work for now.

Compared to Eclipse and Android Studio, Xcode is good! I find Eclipse and Android Studio to be slow, and they typically break every upgrade. (AS is currently complaining about a modified ant.jar and refusing to upgrade... wasn't me who did that!)

Having said that xcode currently crashes once a day for me. Not sure if it's in the preprocessing/indexing phase as it falls over with large numbers of #defines and ~80k lines of C++.