Thanks, interdev.
Yes, it is possible, Xcode is just an IDE around command-line tools such as make
, gcc
and others. But Xcode makes a lot of things easy for you, building your own development environment would be a lot of work. If you just want to use a different editor, you might want to check out man xcodebuild
.
You need to at least install Xcode (or more specifically the Apple Developer Tools package, which includes Xcode and various other tools etc). You can then use the underlying tools directly without actually going via the Xcode IDE, but that would be a perverse thing to do.
It's possible to not use Xcode, but trying to develop iPhone apps without it would make your life so much harder I'd strongly encourage you to use it. You'll have to install the dev tools that includes it anyway, and it's mandatory for deploying the app on the iPhone to test it so you may as well get using it now.