So I’ve heard a lot of chatter on the net about XCode being very crashy. I thought it was just people’s installations, or that they were using Funny Template Tricks, or that they were using XCode in really strange ways.

Today I finally figured out what all the fuss is about - I’ve crashed XCode at least 6 times today.

My code is not complex. Today I started using (fairly simple) templates in my current project, and that’s about when the fun began. XCode really doesn’t like when I try to resize my Errors and Warnings window (so I can try to see the entire error that the STL has helpfully verbosely generated for me.)

Below are My Top Reasons Why XCode Sucks

1. No horizontal scrollbar for the Errors and Warnings window

   obviously nobody internal to Apple uses the Standard Template Library…

2. XCode misses errors

   Most of the time linker errors don’t show up in the errors and warnings window - you have to use the command line program xcodebuild to see them.

3. The Interface

   If you don’t use XCode like Visual C++ (with one big window with multiple tabs) you will get confused. Quickly. Probably it will crash too.

4. No Save Functionality

   rarely am I able to manually save a file I’m working on. Ummm… why can’t I?

5. Work on keybindings, folks

   I’ve been having major problems with keybindings - and have had to retrain my fingers to remember new commands for things - things that I’ve been using for years - just for XCode. Things like F1 to insert my datestamp, Control-Tick to switch from header to source file, etc. Oh, and today was the topping on the cake - I somehow killed my delete key. Delete no longer deletes a (nice) character!!!. Yes, I’ve reassigned Delete to the Delete command in the Text Editor keybindings (with no luck). I’m going to have to revert to an earlier copy of my keybindings - however long ago that was…

6. Give Me Some Hints

   When the application bundle fails to build properly, please give me some hints as to why. Just saying that you couldn’t do it doesn’t help me much…

So, yes, at one point I was doing as much work in XCode as possible… but I think Real Soon Now I’m going to move everything back to CodeWarrior because at least that doesn’t suck.