Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

It's one thing having to download this monstrosity, and a whole other, having to use it daily to write code.

mimiclone 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's nearly impossible to get away from Xcode entirely. You will always need the simulator and probably some entitlement / asset tools. What you can do is write the bulk of your app as an SPM package using your editor of choice, and then include that as a local or GitHub repo dependency in your Xcode shell app (which has no code, just assets, preview assets and plist files)

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brudgers 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-e...

You could probably use Emacs for Swift...just like for about every other language.

Whether you still must download a monstrosity is left as an exercise for the reader.

	▲	whynotmaybe 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm using flutter and had to download xcode to build the app so I guess it's a necessary step.

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sandruso 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had xcede[0] setup that worked well.

[0] https://codeberg.org/luxmentis/xcede

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indemnity 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.

I even read the source using Zed not Xcode :)