Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic.
Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind.
Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch.
I just want to look at a text file with pretty print.
I do not need a 12GB IDE to render curly braces. cat has been doing this since 1971. Dennis Ritchie solved this.
Why, Apple, in 40 years, could you not ship a lightweight dev-oriented text viewer? You had NeXTSTEP. You had the DNA of the most elegant Unix workstation ever built.
And you gave us... this behemoth? An app whose launch time rivals a full Gentoo stage 1 install ( see: https://niden.net/post/gentoo-stage-1-installation )
TextEdit is not the answer.
I've used Xcode for native iOS development and honestly, once you get past the Stockholm Syndrome phase, it's just fine.
- The interface is learnable.
- The debugger mostly works.
But the load times -- on every high-end MBP I've ever owned -- suggest that somewhere deep in the Xcode binary, there's a sleep(rand()) that someone committed in 2006 and no one has had the courage to git blame.
FWIW, I fear someone here tells me I've been missing a launch flag. Alas, it's my truth and I can't hold it in anymore.
As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
I believe that “Get Info”->”Open With”->”Change All…” still works, and there are command line methods or third party tools.
This has driven me to madness too.