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Alternative editors?

December 12, 2011 - Roundwall Software

I’m especially curious how anyone is able to use something other than Xcode for developing things with Objective-C. This is specifically an issue for Objective-C projects as opposed to Rails/Node.js/whatever-else-is-cool projects because those can be done in pretty much any editor.

Current Xcode does not allow you to set another editor as the default for a given file-format, so it’s not nearly as convenient as it was in Xcode 3 to simply open files in your favorite editor. Isn’t it a hassle to jump between Xcode and your editor of choice? You would need to edit in one, but debug, refactor and analyze in another. This doesn’t slow down work and/or bother anyone? Xcode is more than just a text-editor, it’s a whole IDE. Everything it does beyond basic text editing is pretty fancy and I wonder how much effort it is worth to try to recreate any of that in another editor no matter how nifty that editor might be. Someone tell me I’m wrong and there’s actually really nice ways to build Objective-C projects in other editors (and not that Eclipse-looking IDE that popped up, not much interest there).