On Feb 19, 2007, at 10:43 AM, Paul Walmsley wrote: I think your complaints are more nits than serious shortcomings. Does the Find in Project feature actually get in your way every day? And is there no acceptable workaround?
When using projects containing multiple sub-projects the find function is absolutely unusable. It insists on opening a new window containing each sub-project. Xcode's support for sub-projects in general is woeful. Try doing a command click to find a symbol that's defined in a sub-project. You'll be lucky if it ever finds it.
Hardly. I use sub-projects all the time and I've never been annoyed with Find in Project. I guess I'm pretty lucky because command click seems to work fine for me. That is my criteria for "serious shortcoming". There are very few parts of Xcode that get in my way on a regular basis. The only thing that really comes close is the debugger, and that is just GDB. There isn't much Apple can do with that.
I agree insofar as the debugger is pretty dreadful, but I disagree that it's purely down to gdb. There is lots the GUI could do to wrap the display of variables to make it possible to see what's going on. I know that there is support for data formatters, but the fact that basic STL structures aren't easily visible is an absolute pain. Even for basic structures you have to drill down five or six levels to get useful information.
You can configure GDB (and the GUI) to display variables the way you want. I don't know where they are defined in GDB, but the GUI can use Custom Data Formatters. Unfortunately, half the time the debugger won't even step into your inline function or, if it does, can access any data. Compare all this with VS.Net 2005 (which is now two years old). Find in files works well. Find symbols work across sub-projects. The call browser does an excellent job. The debug visualisers show the contents of lists, vectors, maps, xml strings, etc. Those that diss VS.Net ought to actually try it to do serious development on. It's a joy compared to Xcode's foibles. I will await Xcode 3.0 with great anticipation. I hope it will actually fix these fundamental issues rather than fiddling around with extraneous GUI (though from the looks of the Xray on the preview page, it doesn't look hopeful).
I certainly admit that Xcode doesn't have all the bells and whistles that the other ones have, and what it does have doesn't work consistently. But personally, I don't often use those those features when they are available. I like and IDE and editors that don't get in my way. I just hope that whatever fancy enhancements go into Xcode 3.0 can be switched off.
John |