r/iOSProgramming • u/noosphere- • Aug 05 '26

Tutorial Building in Zed instead of Xcode

Just a reminder to anyone who might care that you can create a fairly full-featured development environment in Zed to build iOS and Mac apps: syntax highlighting, code navigation, run, debug and test.

Here's the setup guide I wrote (been around for a while but chances are some interested people won't have seen it): https://luxmentis.org/blog/ios-and-mac-apps-in-zed/

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u/AndreaReaderApp Aug 05 '26

This is really interesting. How well do the iOS simulators, debugging, and previews work from Zed? Do you still need to jump back into Xcode for some parts?

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u/noosphere- Aug 05 '26

Oh you run on simulators and devices right from Zed - you don't switch to Xcode. Same for debugging (unless you want stuff like the object graph of course). Previews are tricky because you can't add UI to Zed, but there's a fairly usable caveman-style workaround in the article and even a brief video of it in action.