Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#1

Post by p5v » Sun, May 03, 2026, 4:33 PM UTC

It's one thing having to download this monstrosity, and a whole other, having to use it daily to write code.

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#2

Post by taraharris » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#3

Post by brudgers » Sun, May 03, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-e...

You could probably use Emacs for Swift...just like for about every other language.

Whether you still must download a monstrosity is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#4

Post by indemnity » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.

I even read the source using Zed not Xcode :)

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#5

Post by sandruso » Sun, May 03, 2026, 6:54 PM UTC

I had xcede[0] setup that worked well.

[0] https://codeberg.org/luxmentis/xcede

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#6

Post by whynotmaybe » Sun, May 03, 2026, 8:25 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #3

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-e... You could probably use Emacs for Swift...just like for about every other language. Whether you still must download a monstrosity is left as an exercise for the reader.

I'm using flutter and had to download xcode to build the app so I guess it's a necessary step.

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#7

Post by mimiclone » Sun, May 03, 2026, 10:07 PM UTC

It's nearly impossible to get away from Xcode entirely. You will always need the simulator and probably some entitlement / asset tools. What you can do is write the bulk of your app as an SPM package using your editor of choice, and then include that as a local or GitHub repo dependency in your Xcode shell app (which has no code, just assets, preview assets and plist files)

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#8

Post by Kyosuke1008 » Mon, May 04, 2026, 8:08 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#9

Post by 21-DOT-DEV » Mon, May 04, 2026, 9:02 AM UTC

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

#10

Post by late_night_fix » Mon, May 04, 2026, 9:40 AM UTC

I feel like most Xcode free-swift setups still secretly depends on xcodebuild for anything real.