XCode was a motivating factor in my purchase of JetBrains products, specifically CLion.

New thing this year, but VSCode + with Apple's SourceKit LSP extension [1] has been working surprisingly well for me. Glad to have more alternatives to Xcode.

Have been using SPM's "swift build" + some copy commands to create a fully functional signable bundle, no need even for an .xcodeproj.

[1] https://nshipster.com/vscode/

I'm curious about this. Could you do iOS app development this way? Or at least native Mac development using cocoa like you could in xcode?

Yes! The build just produces a single executable. For example, in a Mac app this would be the file inside Contents/MacOS.

You then need to create a folder with an .app extension, set up a simple folder structure, and add some necessities such as the Info.plist file and your resources like the app icon/images. And codesign or notarize depending on your deployment requirements.

Code completion works great for dev and I've found VSCode to be snappier than Xcode even if the underlying engine (SourceKit) is supposed to be the same. The only thing "missing" is not having Interface Builder, but probably most serious projects use code-generated UIs anyway. You could, of course, still make an .xib file in Xcode and use it in your VSCode project. (I don't have a MainMenu.xib myself.)

See: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Thank you for sharing!

The best part about JetBrains products is you learn one IDE and can use it with just about any language -- Java, C, Swift, Kotlin, C#, etc.

It's the same for VSCode and JS/TS support though. Fighting against a fully featured, free, open-source and well-established product just on the basis of speed is going to be an uphill battle.

There is a big "ugh, Electron apps" contingent of Mac users.

Or at least, there's a loud one, and I guess they figured it's also a big-enough one...

The vast majority of developers aren't hanging out on HN though. I'll wait till there are real benchmarks but I'd be very surprised if Nova is actually noticeably more performant than VS Code.

Just the fact that Nova is ~36MB and VSCode is ~3x that at ~95MB should at least point you in the right direction. Also note that Nova already includes features that are only available via separate plugins on VSCode.

But 95MB is small enough that it doesn't matter—1/3 the size of basically nothing is still basically nothing. Even in terms of memory or CPU usage, VS Code is relatively efficient compared to some other products on the market such as the JetBrains IDEs.

Say what you will about Electron apps in general, but Microsoft has done a great job in making VS Code not feel like a typical Electron app.

> VS Code is relatively efficient compared to some other products on the market such as the JetBrains IDEs.

That's not really a fair comparison I think. JetBrains IDEs do a lot more than VS Code. You'd have to load it up with plugins to make something resembling a fair comparison, and in that case I'd be very interested in how efficient VS Code still is.

I completely agree, but I would wager that VS Code would still be noticeably faster even if it had all of the functionality that IntelliJ does. As a daily user of the latter, it seems like they have a lot more room for optimization, whereas VS Code seems to have been built from day 1 with performance in mind. But this is pure anecdote so I could be wrong.

If you have 4G of ram and 120G of disk and a slow internet connection all of this matter.

Fwiw before getting internet fiber, a 95MB file resulted in about 20 min download (my reference was 300MB an hour).

It's more about "enough proportion of ..", and my 5 cents are that using mac hardware _always_ with a very tiny internet connection is kind of rare. So not enough to base an argument on, in my opinion. Kinda having expensive mac hardware most probably implies access to some time of a good internet connection to download/update tools needed.

We're not just Mac users.

Electron apps are bloated ick but I guess at least Electron is equally repulsive on all OSes.

Where? Here in HN, a little bit, but out IRL?

Out in real life no one knows or cares about this

VSC is more of a memory hog but in use it isn’t noticeably slower than Nova.

React Native for Windows and macOS is developed by Microsoft, and they continuously show how Electron bloat means it uses 300x more resources than Win32, UWP, React Native applications.

My hope is that they create enough momentum to force the VSCode team to rewrite in React Native.

Especially because TS and VSC already move at blazing speeds.

I would definitely welcome some competition for XCode.

Check out AppCode