Fatbobman’s Swift Weekly #051 | Xcode Is Not Alone

Weekly Comment

Xcode Is Not Alone

After JetBrains announced the discontinuation of updates for AppCode, many developers worried that Xcode would lack competition, lose the motivation to grow, and that there would be fewer alternatives for developing Swift projects. However, with the continuous improvement of the plugin provided by the Swift Server Work Group for VSCode, and the emergence of AI editors like Cursor the ecosystem of Swift development tools is quietly changing. Now, developing Swift projects on VSCode or Cursor is becoming not only increasingly easy but also a better experience.

In the past week, I tried a new way of working: I opened the same project simultaneously in Xcode, VSCode, and Cursor, frequently switching between them. This approach not only allowed me to leverage the unique advantages of each editor but also improved my mood through visual changes (such as different layouts and theme colors), effectively helping me overcome challenges in development.

Unlike AppCode, strictly speaking, VSCode (Cursor) and Xcode are not in direct competition. On one hand, VSCode fills the gap for developing Swift code outside the Apple ecosystem, while both bring additional conveniences to developers within the Apple ecosystem. For instance, in my experience, their…