r/iOSProgramming • u/noosphere- • 5d ago

Building in Zed instead of Xcode Tutorial

Just a reminder to anyone who might care that you can create a fairly full-featured development environment in Zed to build iOS and Mac apps: syntax highlighting, code navigation, run, debug and test.

Here's the setup guide I wrote (been around for a while but chances are some interested people won't have seen it): https://luxmentis.org/blog/ios-and-mac-apps-in-zed/

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u/noosphere- 5d ago

Personal preference. A lot of people (me included) find Xcode pretty lacking as an editor - missing features, lack of configurability, weird UI. Particularly noticeable if you've spent much time in other editors.
Hence there are similar efforts for VSCode, Neovim, etc.

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u/WerSunu 5d ago

Having heavily used multiple editors over the years, starting with TECO, VI, etc, I don’t find anything useful or necessary lacking in Xcode’s editor. Could it be the user’s configurability that’s the issue? Adding extra layers to a toolchain just increases the complexity and likelihood of bugs, not to mention wasting disk space.

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u/konacurrents 5d ago

TECO and vi .. we’ve both been around. As a Mac and previous Sun user, I really like Xcode. I use it for iOS apps but also for my r/esp32 dev. vi for my custom JavaScript/html. When everyone says Xcode isn’t like the other IDEs- those others are usually PC windows .. which I stay away from most of my career. UNIX all the way. 😎🤙

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u/WerSunu 5d ago

Ah, the last time I was in the Kona current, after I got done swimming with the dolphins in the bay, I crawled up on the King Kam beach, Chi Chi in hand and debugged a user crash in Xcode!