Does anybody use XCode for anything other than macOS/iOS development?

Software
1

I’ve been having lots of unexplained crashes since upgrading to Sonoma, and I decided it was time to just nuke everything and start over. There are too many misc. apps I’ve tried over the years, and I figured a clean start would be good.

So I’m all reinstalled, and I double-clicked a PHP file to edit it - and XCode popped up. Up until now I’ve been using BBEdit, but it got me wondering - is XCode a viable general-purpose editor? I mean, it’s free with macOS. It seems to understand PHP syntax.

Do people actually use it for other languages / web dev / etc.? Why or why not?

2

I grumble every time XCode opens rather than BBEdit. XCode is too heavy to use as a general-purpose editor.

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4

Unfortunately I need the command line tools, so I need Xcode installed. I should probably look into RAM usage though.

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5

Xcode for programming software. Much preferable to Eclipse which confuses from the get go; I’m sure there a optional packages that would do what I want but the descriptions are too arcane. MacVim for pretty much everything else that is not a document in particular at the moment using MacVim when writing SQL orders with syntax colouring turned on.

6

I think you can install the command line tools without the IDE. As others have implied, xCode is kind of a pig.

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7

I don’t use XCode, but I can see how I might’ve had Jetbrains never existed.

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8

I like Xcode for programming, but certainly get BBEdit set to default for all text based files opened from the Finder.

9

…and time hogging with those updates.

VSCode is also free and will edit pretty much anything. It’s not a ‘Mac-assed app’ but it does a decent job.

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10

Only for iOS development.

There are better tools for every other task…

(I wish Apple had competition that would force them to improve Xcode, but JetBrains has stopped AppCode development)

11

Xcode is massive. If you just need the command line tools you can install those separately without installing the multiple gigs of Xcode. In a fresh install, open the terminal and type git, and it’ll prompt you to install just the command line tools. That’s what I do.

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12

You can also enter the command xcode-select --install in the terminal to begin the installation process, too.

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I also use Xcode for C++ development. It’s actually really good about supporting the last C++ standard, although that’s probably more the work of LLVM than Apple.