Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of people say this but I find Xcode quite good. I can load a huge project and be editing in around 5 seconds, compared to waiting several minutes in Android Studio. It has very clear in-line diffing, incredibly fast project-wide search, and very consistent hotkeys making keyboard navigation very simple (especially if you like to spatially arrange your editors via hotkey). I also find that its UI is responsive and well designed, good aesthetic choices, consistent stroke widths on icons, consistent typography, etc

Some of the "badness" of Xcode comes when you have to deal with a huge, mixed-language project (Objective-C, Objective-C++, C++, C, Swift). But then, I don't know of an IDE that handles that situation gracefully, and in a unified way. Xcode still manages to parse and autocomplete all the above languages with a good degree of grace, but the clunkiness comes in knowing how to connect them all together and why the damn thing won't build or link — it's pretty hard to shield the programmer from that complexity

I have some major gripes with Xcode as it is now (though otherwise I find it to be quite good):

1. Startup time is too long. Often I find myself double clicking a code file in Finder to preview it only to be greeted with jumping Xcode icon. Riiiight, here we goooo, boss. Just 2-3 seconds, boss. It should open the file straight away, and then lazily load the rest of its frameworks if necessary.

2. Code editor is very bad with large files. Be it large JSON data, or C++ files from Unity's code generator, navigating and editing those is painful. Every typed symbol will incur a delay, every switch to different place in that file is noticeable too. This is by far the worst of all other code editors I used, but I get it, few people have to work with huge amount of text.

3. pbxproj format for project. Ever worked in a team where several people adding and removing files in their commits? Happy project merging then. Or rather, happy searching for a tool to auto-regenerate the project. This format has to go.

Agree on all three points

1. I certainly wouldn't use Xcode for editing single files from the Finder. For opening a huge project with thousands of files, ready to build and fully indexed for autocompletion and finding, it still only takes a few seconds. That's the metric that impresses me

2. Yeah I have one long file in my current project (hundreds of thousands of lines) and it isn't pleasant to edit in Xcode

3. I am quite good at merging pbxproj after 10 years of doing it, even when files are added and removed. But yeah, it is a bit hairy

I'm curious about (1), because that isn't my experience at all! For me it takes its time to open, and indexing is not very fast. I'm only on x86 rather than an M1, but even so...!

In comparison, I've found that VS Code is fast; after opening a workspace, opening any file by name or doing a live search by content is more or less immediate.

You're absolutely right, compared to VS Code or Sublime Text, Xcode is much slower to open a large project. It's a fixed cost of about five - ten extra seconds for me, once it's open it is fast to navigate

I think I am used to comparing it to Android Studio as I mostly do native mobile development for Android and iOS

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