Chapter 4
Editing Source Code

As developers, we don’t actually spend most of our time configuring projects or laying out storyboards. Most of the time, we’re coding. And, in turn, that means we spend most of our time writing and editing source code. So, it’s critical that Xcode have a pleasant and productive code editing UI. And as Mac users, we have high standards, thanks to decades of great text editors on the platform, like BBEdit and TextMate. If Xcode can’t at least be as good as those, we’ll be sorely tempted to take our source code elsewhere.

Fortunately, Xcode’s source editor got a lot better in Xcode 9, based in part on the work that was done for the Playgrounds app for iOS. In this chapter, we’ll look at ways to make our coding life better.