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Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

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Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#261

Post by spacedcowboy »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #238
spacedcowboy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ? Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used…

> I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE This is the dumbest response anyone can ever have to being presented with the answer to their own question of "what's wrong". Ok you don't think this is important but your customer (or whatever) just to told you it's important to them . Surprise surprise this is literally why xcode sucks (because Apple seeks to dictate inste…

shrug I don't have customers, or whatevers. I've been using Xcode for over 20 years. In all that time, it's been denigrated and put down as rubbish, meanwhile I've found it to be pretty darn good.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but whatever it is, it works for me. I still don't see any advantage to putting a second-rate (they're never as good as the real thing) terminal into an IDE. Someone mentioned project-specific completions, but I can't say I've ever needed the terminal to do that, and I generally don't run IDE-specific tools (also mentioned) from the terminal either.

Maybe my natural workflow gels better with how Apple envisioned people using the IDE, perhaps I happen to be on the "golden path", but ... again shrug. Works for me.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#262

Post by aylmao »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #249
ASalazarMX wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. A decade ago I used to develop in PyCharm for websites, and Visual Studio .Net for desktop apps. Then I had to learn XCode for a mobile app. It was a surreal experience, like going back ten years in UX, while at the same time dealing with a myriad of modern…

> This means you've learned to work around its shortcomings. All software of comparable size and complexity have shortcomings that everyone learns to work around. And a great many of those shortcomings are actually just highly subjective personal preferences. More than half of the complaints in this thread are, to me, a terrible idea.

> All software of comparable size and complexity have shortcomings that everyone learns to work around.

This is part of the issue IMO. Is this size and complexity warranted?

Rust for example; its a complex language, can target pretty much all platforms under the sun, and yet it's configured with just text files, builds with just terminal commands, and works great with any text editor.

I've seen people in big tech work on codebases millions of files big with everything from VSCode to a russian text editor from the 90s. Linus Trovalds is building Linux with MicroEMACS. Why do I need a behemoth like Xcode to build a To Do app? Why does it have to be this "big and complex"?

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#264

Post by spacedcowboy »

9dev wrote: post #139
spacedcowboy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sitting here struggling to think of why the hell you need a terminal emulator in an IDE. There's a perfectly good terminal emulator called Terminal.app, it's usually the first thing I put on my dock after a fresh install of MacOS. I like the terminal, but ... in an IDE ? I always wondered why Eclipse had one as well - it just seems like a wasted pane ? Perhaps it's just the setup you (the generic "you") are used…

Because I like to get project-aware completions, or run pre-configured tools from the IDE in an actual shell, for example. Also, when working on multiple projects, it’s much easier to have shells attached to a specific project that I can toggle with a keyboard shortcut to get process output or Claude right next to the code I’m looking at.

Can you give specific examples ? About the only thing I use the terminal for in Xcode is "git" - and even then these days I tend to use Fork.app for that.

Debugging is integrated, profiling is integrated, script-running as part of the build is integrated. Application output is integrated. What do you actually use it for ? Genuine question.

I guess the AI tools might be something - I don't know about that, I don't use them.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#266

Post by billynomates »

mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

As someone who use Eclipse and transitioned to Android Studio over the course of my career, Android Studio is actually pretty great. These days I use Cursor almost exclusively for Flutter, but Android Studio is great for building native Android apps.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#267

Post by spacedcowboy »

lynndotpy wrote: post #173
spacedcowboy wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I’m not seeing what you’re seeing. I don’t often switch desktops - I tend to keep a project on a desktop, and there’s enough real-estate for everything I need for that project right there - and I don’t work on more than one project at a time. Window switching is instantaneous though, and I do that a lot

As you said, it's the set up. I'm almost exclusively using a single monitor, which works well when there's zero cost to switching desktops. For your use case, imagine if the Window switcher, instead of being instantaneous, was a ~1200ms animation which blocked all key presses during the animation.

Mm. On the Studio, my desktop switching is pretty quick - 17 frames from tapping the ctrl/arrow. I have an M4 Max which is actually 1 frame faster at 16 frames (though measurement-error probably accounts for that).

In either case that's less than 1/3 of a second. It's nowhere near what you're seeing. I'd be tempted to take the machine to an Apple Store and say "this is broken, please fix it".

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#268

Post by svantana »

billynomates wrote: post #266
mads_quist wrote: post #265

What else is there to say than that xCode is a f... nightmare. Android studio is not really better though. Native app development is an evil necessity.

As someone who use Eclipse and transitioned to Android Studio over the course of my career, Android Studio is actually pretty great. These days I use Cursor almost exclusively for Flutter, but Android Studio is great for building native Android apps.

Came to say the same thing about Xcode, hehe. Could it be that the best tool is the one you're used to.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#269

Post by aylmao »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #69
allthetime wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question. I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch. Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day. What is so horrible about XCode?

Like you, I think that Xcode maybe gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it's also endlessly frustrating. First, the performance is just bad . The responsiveness compared to apps like VSC or Panic’s Nova is night-and-day. The attention given to the design of new features is piss-poor. Placing the AI functionality on the left sidebar makes no sense; all the other tools on the left are project management; the "let me…

> their insistence on using a GUI instead of a basic JSON manifest just compounds it

I think this is a big part of the problem. Apple owns the IDE and the programming languages; in theory this should lead to a great experience. In practice, because they insist you only use their languages with their ide, and their ide with their languages, it leads to lousy tool design.

Features that would be best implemented as part of the compiler suite are instead be implemented in the GUI. File formats that could be simplified live on, because everyone is using GUIs in the IDE to edit them anyway.

Fixes that should be prioritized in the IDE get punted because the IDE is not competing with any other IDE, it's the only way to develop the language, people will use it anyway, etc.

Re: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

#270

Post by spacedcowboy »

zen928 wrote: post #213
timtimmy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with IDEs that have a terminal view, I still much prefer using a separate terminal app.

Why? It seems pretty pointless to keep hot memory of the context of every app and tab you have open as to recall what process and tab and window ties to what thing you were doing at what time, when it's effectively all one related workflow inside your Integrated* Development Environment. Do you just keep a separate dedicated tab in your terminal for actions you would only do against a single directory?

My machine has more memory than I generally know what to do with. The mapped-into-memory footprint of Terminal.app right now is ~112MB, for 12 terminal tabs across 4 windows.

In other words, I don't care about the memory use.

I think I commented earlier that there's not that much I use the terminal for during development - mainly git. Keeping a terminal open, mainly hidden, in the bottom-left corner with the tab set to the top-level directory isn't really a burden.

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