What features do you miss most when switching from IntelliJ to XCode ?

Question

Hi,

I've started to use XCode several months ago, after using IntelliJ for several years, and there are quite a few features that I really miss. XCode is not that bad, but it is lacking some basic stuff.

To trigger the discussion, here are some of the features that I miss most, who knows maybe someone from Apple will bump into this post and steal some Ideas :)

1. Source-level error-highlighting. The write-compile-fix cycle feels like going back in time 15 years ago to my early C days. Many errors can be spotted without having to compile and Java IDEs have been doing it for years.
2. A decent debugger. This is a bit unfair because IntelliJ's debugger is the best I've used so far, but XCode's debugger is at least 5 years behind and Apple has a few more developers than JetBrains...
3. Stronger re-factoring. A no-brainer I guess. XCode has some renaming capabilities (which they call re-factoring), but they are very few.
4. Override method. This one is really amazing. XCode doesn't have an "override method" command which lets you choose the method you want to override from a super class or protocol. You need to go to the documentation or header file and start copy-pasting.
5. Duplicate selected line(s). I've bumped into some posts that offer workarounds for this via custom key-binding, but none of them works, at least for me.
6. Go to last edit point. Bummer! Come on Apple, this one is so easy to implement and so useful!
7. A better open quickly feature. IntelliJ's quick find of classes/files/text is so much better...

Turns out that my list goes on and on, so I'll stop here...

What other features do you miss most in your transition to XCode??

Ori

Answer 1

Intentions are a great tool in IntelliJ. They quickly help identify things I might have otherwise missed. The new Build and Analyze feature in XCode 3.2 is a good start in the right direction.

And they just announced IntelliJ is now available via Open Source. I hope this means we start seeing more adoption, perhaps more plugins to make it more useful for Mac/iPhone development.

Answer 2

Maybe we soon will get all those features. According to an interview in JavaPosse #283, Jetbrains is working on an IDE for Objective-C :)

Answer 3

As for the better Open Quickly feature - Code Pilot for Xcode might help here :) http://macoscope.net/en/mac/codepilot/

Answer 4

+1 on all your points. But I'd also like to have better local revision tracking (Actually this is from eclipse, rather than IntelliJ, but still). I usually realise I should have taken a snapshot of the code after I've made a mess.