alt.hn

5/3/2026 at 4:33:09 PM

Ask HN: Those building Swift apps without touching Xcode, what is your workflow?

by p5v

5/4/2026 at 1:10:07 PM

tauri 2 + rust + webview give you a native feeling if you don't need any Apple frameworks

by trymamboapp

5/4/2026 at 9:40:33 AM

I feel like most Xcode free-swift setups still secretly depends on xcodebuild for anything real.

by late_night_fix

5/3/2026 at 10:07:49 PM

It's nearly impossible to get away from Xcode entirely. You will always need the simulator and probably some entitlement / asset tools. What you can do is write the bulk of your app as an SPM package using your editor of choice, and then include that as a local or GitHub repo dependency in your Xcode shell app (which has no code, just assets, preview assets and plist files)

by mimiclone

5/3/2026 at 5:52:17 PM

https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-e...

You could probably use Emacs for Swift...just like for about every other language.

Whether you still must download a monstrosity is left as an exercise for the reader.

by brudgers

5/3/2026 at 8:25:30 PM

I'm using flutter and had to download xcode to build the app so I guess it's a necessary step.

by whynotmaybe

5/3/2026 at 6:42:12 PM

I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.

I even read the source using Zed not Xcode :)

by indemnity

5/4/2026 at 8:08:36 AM

[flagged]

by Kyosuke1008

5/4/2026 at 9:02:08 AM

[dead]

by 21-DOT-DEV

5/3/2026 at 5:01:28 PM

[dead]

by taraharris