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Friday 2 July 2021

Is AppCode better than Xcode?

 More or less the title. Is it worth purchasing AppCode? I'd definitely use it for personal projects but does any professional /work environment use it as well? Is it just more common to see XCode in offices?

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[–]mikesmithson171 19 points  

If you program use interfaces only by code, than it is great assistant to you. But if you want swiftUI or storyboards than better not to waste money ;)

[–]Small_Photograph5863 3 points  

I like Figma + SwiftUI. There's a great plugin that helps hammer out some of the details too.

[–]FrozenPyromaniac_ 3 points  

What’s the plug-in?

[–]mmikhno 2 points  

Figma + SwiftUI

Most probably this one https://swiftui.ai/

[–]timusus 10 points  

I've been using AppCode professionally, as my primary iOS editor for years. I usually do all of my code editing in AppCode, and have Xcode running for when I need to jump into storyboards or project setup stuff.

I've never felt very comfortable in Xcode - but I was using IntellJ products before I ever picked it up.

I think it's definitely worth while. Editing in AppCode is just more powerful than Xcode.

[–]saladthievez 7 points  

Been using JetBrain IDEs for years and recently (a few months ago) had to jump to Xcode. I was and still am surprised at how bad / archaic it is.

[–]Evariste-Lovelace 1 point  

Does it still have the issue where some autocomplete didn’t work?

Sometimes when using lesser used APIs like CG, or some delegates, AppCode wouldn’t autocomplete it.

[–]joep-b 1 point  

I've never had Xcode autocomplete anything I needed. It only seems to give me the wrong suggestions all the time.

[–]RobinFalko 8 points  

I used it two years ago. It was great with editing and refactoring as long no generics were involved. Also using xibs and storyboards was kind of ok, just double click the file in appcode and it will open the file in xcode automatically.

xcode also did some little progress in refactoring tools, but by far not as good as the tools in appcode (if the code is ~simple~ enough)

As soon as the code gets more dynamic it begins to struggle with type inference and from that point it is (or it was, maybe that has changed) no more fun to use. I use to use generics and extensions with type associations a lot, so i quit using appcode and switched back to xcode.

[–]SuperDuperTango 3 points  

I use it all day every day on a fairly large production code base in the App Store. I love it and wouldn’t go back to only Xcode. It is especially good if you have used other IntelliJ IDEs before, as it feels like home. This is just my opinion, but I feel the editing experience is way better than Xcode. Some of the pluses that I find (some of which others have mentioned) are:

  • the editor
  • refactoring is much more powerful
  • multi window management seems more sane to me.
  • I prefer how AppCode does find-in-files
  • the debugger is much easier to use
  • a 3rd party tool I can’t live without anymore is GrepConsole that let’s you have multiple console windows each one grepping the main console. Some things you can’t stop in the debugger so console tools are my friend.
  • running multiple simulators each with a separate console window. (I think Xcode might be able to do this now)

That said it does have a couple of drawbacks:

  • it can’t do storyboards or xibs. You have to use Xcode for that. We use storyboards and xibs heavily, so I always have Xcode open as well as AppCode so I can flip to Xcode when working on graphics (I have no experience yet with SwiftUI, so I can’t speak to that).

  • All the IntelliJ IDEs are Java based so there’s a decent amount of extra memory and cpu used (especially if you end up running both Xcode and AppCode. The memory I haven’t found to be too much of a problem because MacOS swaps well. But the CPU burn can drain battery on a laptop. (Add in running one or two sims, and slack, and sketch, etc, etc, and my poor machine gets super hot)

  • it seems the price to pay for the extra editing feature is a longer indexing time for large projects on startup.

Even with these quirks and some others I still love it.

In the end, all of this is merely opinion. There’s nothing that objectively makes one better than the other so YMMV. If you try it and love it, great, go forth and kick ass. If you enjoy Xcode better, that’s great too, go forth and kick ass as well.

Either way, have fun and sling some good code.

[–]thebermudalocketObjective-C / Swift 1 point  

Re: AppCode + SwiftUI, you can use the usual Simulator paired with Injection III. Changes in your SwiftUI file(s) will trigger an update on the simulator.

[–]leo150 4 points  

XCode feels like Notepad after AppCode. Using it for years already. You need a strong laptop though.

[–]powerje 3 points  

It's a lot better than Xcode

[–]jorshhh 3 points  

You have one month free if I recall correctly. Try it for sure!

[–]20InMyHead 2 points  

AppCode was great in the ObjC days, but I found they didn’t transition well to Swift.

[–][deleted] 1 point  

That's unfortunate to hear! What makes you say that?

[–]Bikkel77 2 points  

I used it all the time about 4 years ago, than abandoned it when Swift became the main language and appcode was just lacking in features. I recently started using it again, and loving it, also because we use kotlin multiplatform to share business logic with Android (I highly recommend that by the way!). A lot of bugs have been fixed and now it’s usable for all three languages (ObjC, Swift, Kotlin) and way better than Xcode in my opinion

[–]patniemeyer 1 point  

Intellij's products are *the best*, but AppCode is limited. It's useful to have around if there is some major refactoring you want to do, but I find myself drifting back to xcode for most things eventually. The thing I missed most when working in XCode was vim key bindings until I found XVim2... That broke under Big Sur but there if you are desperate there are workarounds.

[–]Bullfrog-Dear 1 point  

i've tried it before but because my work place uses storyboards and xib heavily, it was just not worth the hassle of jumping back and forth for me.
which is a shame, because i find Android Studio more comfortable!

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