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 don't know how did you achieve it, but I was doing it countless times.
Open with -> other -> enable all applications -> always open with.
For a short while it works, but somehow, something always reverts it back to xcode. Maybe it is restart. Maybe it is little evil cron job discreetly changes it back to xcode, but I was never able to get rid of it. It is happening to me on many different machines since Sierra. One calm day I casually double-click an STL or JSON and it prompts me to install some xcode packages, and I get angry at the machine.