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Comment by vrutberg | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

> 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.

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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