Comment by logbiscuitswave | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logbiscuitswave | Hacker News Reader

logbiscuitswave

I primarily use Visual Studio and VSCode for development professionally. I have been playing around with Xcode a lot for some personal projects on my Mac.

In many ways it’s pretty good, but there’s some omissions and other behaviors that I find simply astonishing.

Why can’t I view two code windows side-by-side? Why can’t I dock the controls library so it’s always visible? Why does the documentation view always have to be on top of everything else? Why can I zoom the Interface Builder when building iOS applications but not Mac applications? Why do things just kind of stop working and require restarting every couple of hours?

In many ways Xcode just seems to lack a lot of the polish and capability Visual Studio has.

I tried playing with Visual Studio and Xamarin on my Mac to see if it could accelerate development by allowing me to leverage my familiarity with C# and found it to be so cumbersome (change to Xcode and mess around with IB, switch to VS, switch back to Xcode…ugh) that I just ditched that flow completely and went all in with Swift/SwiftUI/Obj-C instead.

> Why can’t I view two code windows side-by-side?

You can: in general, pressing option will open a new code editor (the exact behavior is configurable in Preferences > Navigation > "Optional Navigation"). For example, option-click a file in the Project Navigator to open it in the "next" editor; this will open a second editor if only one is open.

In exchange, I'd genuinely like to know how to open more than one solution at a time in Visual Studio for Mac. I know about the checkbox in the Options panel of the Open dialog, but if you don't remember to turn that off every time it closes your existing solution. Also, it's documented that holding the Control key when choosing from Recent Solutions has this effect, but that has never worked for me.

Not solutions to your problems, but perhaps some background you might find interesting:

> Why can’t I dock the controls library so it’s always visible?

This actually used to be how it was before. It got changed into an overlay panel a couple years ago.

> Why can I zoom the Interface Builder when building iOS applications but not Mac applications?

It’s an implementation detail of how it works under-the-hood. iOS interface is rendered in what’s essentially a simulator and screenshotted, so you can zoom the result freely. For macOS the controls you are seeing are real Mac controls, which do not render at arbitrary magnifications.

I mostly agree but

> Why can’t I view two code windows side-by-side?

This works just fine. You can have unlimited horizontal panes each having the same or a different file. Or, you can open a second Xcode window of the same project (e.g. right click a file and open in new window) hide the UI and you have multiple editor windows for the same project (something VSCode can only do in a limited fashion)

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