The complete guide to iOS and macOS development in Neovim | Hacker News Reader

The complete guide to iOS and macOS development in Neovim

wojciechkulik.pl

26 pointsljosifov7 comments

Aren't you making things needlessly complicated as this point? I like Vim, and Neovim, but wouldn't it be better / smarter / faster to just use Xcode?

It's great that Neovim can be used for iOS and macOS development, I perhaps fail to see the point. Xcode isn't the greatest IDE developer conceived by man, it's probably not even in the top 10, but at least you know that it will remain fairly stable (as in it's a stable platform, not that it's unlikely to crash) and always support iOS and macOS in the latest version. Every bit of documentation and reference material out there is also going to assume that you run Xcode... Oh and as the article points out, you're going to need Xcode anyway.

Not really sure Xcode could be considered stable. Currently on 14.3.1 Xcode frequently crashes when switching branches or running pod install.

Maybe things have changed, but as far as I remember you're supposed to close your workspace before running pod install.

That's the point. Most modern IDEs are designed well enough that arbitrary changes to the files are handled reasonably. I am probably rare in that I like Xcode, but you can feel that it suffers from the cruft of age, or questionable architecture decisions long past. It's fragile and makes strange UX decisions that seem like the product of technical restraints being put on the designers.

I understand that Xcode should handle this better (and SPM doesn't require a restart when installing packages) but the complaint was basically "IDE crashes when I do thing I'm specifically told not to do".

I've experimented with Neovim a few times, adding all sorts of plugins to make it work like VSCode or a Jetbrains IDE. But honestly, I just can't seem to get it to run as smoothly or feel as good as those IDEs.

It’s something to do with one of the LSPs that bogs it down and makes the experience untenable

Here's my monthly thread about the usual vim VS VSCode fights. Funny that these debates happen over and over everytime neovim pops up.

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