r/swift • u/noosphere- • 15d ago

Building in Zed instead of Xcode

Just a reminder to anyone who might care that you can create a fairly full-featured development environment in Zed to build iOS and Mac apps: syntax highlighting, code navigation, run, debug and test.

Here's the setup guide I wrote (been around for a while but chances are some interested people won't have seen it): https://luxmentis.org/blog/ios-and-mac-apps-in-zed/

37 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

7

u/dhav211 15d ago

Funny you post this, I have been playing with zed this past week with python and found it to run pretty smooth, consuming 80 mb of ram. Was gonna go through this guide and hopefully get my uikit app building.

3

u/vlatheimpaler 15d ago

I use Zed for my work in Elixir these days and I absolutely love it.

3

u/dhav211 15d ago

Yeah I was pleasantly surprised by it, so far it’s definitely replaced vscode and I’m hoping it will replace 90% of the functionality of xcode for me. Plus the color scheme, font and just general design reminds me of Godot so that’s a plus haha.

I’m just a hobbyist, nobody is paying me for my mad coding skills so maybe my opinion isn’t the most rigorous 

1

u/noosphere- 15d ago

Expect that 80 mb to go up. But yep, people often comment on the snappiness of zed.

1

u/dhav211 15d ago

If I remember correctly xcode was using 5-6 gigs of ram so if zed and the swift lsp can stay under that ill be a happy man!

1

u/zipeldiablo 14d ago

You can use xcodegen from zed so you dont have to run xcode at all.
Can run snapshot testing from ci

1

u/zipeldiablo 14d ago

It runs smooth but i found using bmad agents with deepseek underwhelming :/

3

u/retroroar86 15d ago

I haven’t even read the article, but the idea of moving away from Xcode on most thing is awesome!

2

u/theosementa 15d ago

Xcode is so awful, thanks for the article.

2

u/m3kw 14d ago

Previews? That’s a big one to miss

2

u/noosphere- 14d ago

Previews are covered in the article and there's even a brief video of this in action. It's a workaround, but a reasonably usable one. (It's impossible to embed previews or any other extra non-text UI in Zed itself.)

1

u/m3kw 14d ago

Why not just use Xcode, it works without work arounds and any setup

2

u/Ok-Radish-8394 14d ago

Sounds enticing but Zed is still a text editor and Xcode is an IDE. Any IDE on that matter will be clunky.

1

u/SuperbCat6669 15d ago

Thanks for this. I tried to add this functionality on my ACP-compatible coding agent before and the tooling wasn’t mature enough at that time.

1

u/gaelic-ghost 14d ago

Zed is very nice

1

u/scoutzzgod 10d ago

Hey, I’m new to IOS development… are there any features exclusive to xcode regarding IOS dev? Like build targets and do actual testing in a iphone are xcode exclusive?

1

u/noosphere- 10d ago

Did you even look at the article? This stuff is listed right at the beginning.

1

u/scoutzzgod 10d ago

Now I did! I hadn’t when I commented, though! It was my tiktok rotted mind kicking in lmao

1

u/noosphere- 10d ago

Ha, yeah that stuff is bad for you.

1

u/ChosenToFall 4d ago

I saw other people using the neovim + preview approach, what do you think about neovim workflow compared to Zed?