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Comment by hkgumbs | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! Honestly my reasoning for avoiding XCode is fairly thin—I just hadn't used it before and didn't have it installed when I started. I imagine if I took the time to learn it, it would be fine. But I do also feel a bit weird about how developing for certain platforms requires you to use a specific IDE. I thought that was part of the goal of Swift (vs ObjC), but I may be just reflecting my own biases :)

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Yep the macOS + Xcode dependency is quite annoying. If you want a, kind of, in between solution, the true dependency is on the command-line tools[0]. These can be installed independent of Xcode. You could piece together your own build scripts or use something like Buck[1] to build it. If you still want a full-blown IDE, checkout AppCode[2] from JetBrains. It still depends on the aforementioned commandline-tools though.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/download/more/ (you'll need an AppleID)

[1] https://buck.build/setup/getting_started.html

[2] https://www.jetbrains.com/appcode/

* edit: formatting & it looks like Buck doesn't have macOS targets.

Make sure you see this comment (I take no blame or credit for its accuracy).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23277219

Very cool project, thanks.

Recently I wrote a script in Swift, on macOS. It can be developed and run without Xcode, in plain vi if you so wish. It's pretty great, and I liked it a lot.

Yup, that was exactly my workflow as well! And for building CLIs it's quite nice. Once I started using AppKit though, it felt like I kept running into things that weren't quite finished.

Did you have experience developing for MacOS before?

I built a few Swift CLIs before, but this was my first time working with AppKit (the macOS GUI framework)

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