Comment by petewarden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petewarden | Hacker News Reader

XCode is an awesome IDE, way better than Eclipse, and nicer than Visual Studio+Visual Assist, which was a surprisingly strong combo.

But, it keeps getting crippled by its need to do fancy UI stuff to impress Steve. Wheee, pretty iChat bubbles for errors! A find using standard Apple conventions! A per-edit file history!

In theory these would be fine, if a bit irrelevant to my daily coding, but inevitably the execution breaks something important that used to work. The find problems are documented elsewhere in this thread, but my personal bug-bear is the file history. You used to be able to cycle back and forth through the files you'd opened in a window, which was an awesome way of building up a working set without having to think. Now if you make an edit, all of your 'forward' history is lost. See the comments here for others bitten by that:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1724655/xcode-3-2-1-file-...

It's not that the XCode team aren't aware of these bugs, all of Apple's internal developers use it and give feedback, but their priorities seem to be driven by demo-ability not usability.

I disagree entirely. There's a lot of things it does poorly - from managing the list of files in the project (why can't I have it just choose a directory?), it's half-baked implementation of Open Quickly, and it's bad find UI.

But all of this wouldn't be an issue if XCode was easily extendable with plugins. And this is where Eclipse and Visual Studio wins out - you can download plugins to do almost anything you need, and to customize it exactly the way you want it. This is the most glaring omission from XCode, and it's really long past due.

I am annoyed by the error bubbles too because they truncate the actual error message - you have to open a whole new window just to see the entire message. In Eclipse, you get a red (X) in the sidebar on which you can click (and a list of problems) so you never have to fight any extraneous windows just to see your error in context.

In my opinion, Eclipse is way better than XCode (not to mention more versatile), and Eclipse's code assist (or whatever they call it) is far superior to XCode's precisely for the reason outlined in this article.

Maybe it's because I'm relatively new to OS X but I find Visual Studio and its single-window interface vastly more efficient and usable than Xcode+IB and it's plethora of open windows.

Have you tried the "All-in-one" layout in Xcode? (Look in the "General" preferences section.) I find it a lot more usable than the default lots-of-windows setting, especially if you have more than one project open.

Never tried. Thanks for the tip.

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