Xcode 4 has a very nice built-in help/documentation that you can access e.g. by alt-clicking an identifier in the code, or by opening the help panel in the right sidebar. However, this only works for classes and methods provided by Apple. Is there a way to write some kind of documentation comments (e.g. like the Javadoc comments in Java) in your own code to make Xcode display them in those documentation panels?
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/HeaderDoc/intro/intro.html
It's maintained by Apple so it should be well supported. I never actually used it, may try it later.
Ok, it looks like there's no good tool really... there are a few different ones, but they're imperfect and difficult to configure. I couldn't get Doxygen or Appledoc to work, and the tool mentioned by Avizzv92 is referred to as "a pile of poo" elsewhere, so I'd rather not try it... :)
Info that I've found:
How do you document your source code in Xcode?
http://wangling.me/2010/07/documentation-set-generation-tool-in-xcode-is-wanted/
http://developer.apple.com/tools/creatingdocsetswithdoxygen.html
http://www.gentlebytes.com/home/appledocapp/
http://lists.apple.com/archives/xcode-users/2011/Apr/msg00238.html
Related
I'd like to use Vim for editing sources and Xcode for all other purposes like managing, debugging etc. I've installed cocoa.vim plugin and it helps with highlighting, but I still need a way to navigate around the code. In java project I used ctags for the purpose, but it doesn't support obj-c.
So the question is: what is the easiest way to generate vi-compatible tags file for Objective-C sources?
I'm the author of the second link that jelera pointed to and must say it is now out of date.
I would follow the advice in the accepted answer of Alternatives to Ctags/Cscope with Objective-c? in order to get full Obj-C parser support in ctags.
If you use tagbar, this post will help get the new ctags binary working with it:
http://bastibe.de/2011-12-04-how-to-make-tagbar-work-with-objective-c.html
This is pretty much the setup I now use.
Yesterday, Dave DeLong answered a question of mine. It wasn't the answer I was looking for, but in the question he mentioned an alternative way of generating doxygen-style documentation for Objective-C.
Before I could really look into it, someone (maybe Dave himself) noticed the answer didn't match the question that well and removed it. *poof* gone was the link to that documentation tool.
I can't remember the name, but I'm fairly certain it's neither HeaderDoc nor Doxygen itself.
Dave, you out there? What was that link again?
I'm clearly not Dave DeLong, but I'd use appledoc, it's pretty darn awesome!
Developer Page quote:
appledoc is command line tool that helps Objective-C developers generate
Apple-like source code documentation
from specially formatted source code
comments. It's designed to take as
readable source code comments as
possible for the input and use
comments as well as surrounding source
code to generate visually appealing
documentation in the form of HTML as
well as fully indexed and browsable
Xcode documentation set. Although
there are several tools that can
create HTML documentation for
Objective-C, all of those know to me
fall short in meeting the minimum of
goals described below.
Human readable source code appledoc is designed to keep source
code comments as readable as possible
even within your source code editor.
Cross references to objects and members Creating cross references to
classes, categories or protocols is
straightforward and automated as much
as possible.
Apple-like source code HTML documentation Generate appealing
HTML documentation with the same style
as Apple's.
Xcode documentation set creation Generate and install fully indexed and
browsable Xcode documentation sets.
Documentation set can also be
automatically installed to Xcode.
Single tool from sorce code to doc set Single tool to drive generation
from source code parsing to
documentation set installation
Easily customizable output appledoc gives you a lot of command
line switches so you can parameterize
output. If this is not enough, you can
change any or all of the template
files to suit your needs.
100% Objective-C implementation The whole appledoc is written in
Objective-C, so you can easily change
it using familiar language and tools.
This also make debugging much simpler
and effective.
I know the ESC key does code completion, but is there a way to get a pop-up(tool-tip I guess) that shows you all the possible choices for a piece of code? As an example, it would be nice when writing Javascript to get a list of available actions. Other apps I've used like Coda do this. I'd like to check out Textmate but I have a hard time getting past this missing feature which I find pretty valuable, particularly as a fairly new programmer who likes to see what options are there as it's a bit of a learning tool for me also. I thought I had found a plugin like what I'm looking for, Dialog2, but it seems to have disappeared as it was meant to be built-in to the never-released TM2.
I've looked around a fair bit for the answer to this question and figured this was my next best option. Thanks.
I don't have Textmate available to try it out, but I believe that option-Esc is supposed to show you the list of possible code completions.
Check out subtleGradient's tmbundle: https://github.com/subtleGradient/javascript.tmbundle
It knows how to auto-wrap for arrays, and objects. Documentation look-up too.
Super-newbie question!
I've been looking for a list of all the classes that come with Objective-C and Cocoa but can't seem to find one.
Hoping that it has matching methods and syntax(?) as well.
Be gentle with me!
Thanks,
Spencer.
I would start here: http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Cocoa/index.html
The system is broken up into frameworks, so you will not find a single listing. It depends on which frameworks you include with your project. good luck.
If you're using XCode, there's a documentation browser (Help -> Documentation) that's searchable. If you want to browse by classes you can also do so here. You might need to subscribe or download the documentation first though.
I'm finding this very convenient for iPhone development at least, since I can just type in a class or method name and get its documentation very quickly. YMMV for Mac OS X documentation though since I haven't used that at all.
I think Xcode is a good IDE, but having used Eclipse for Java development in the past I am quite underwhelmed by XCode's code completion and error/warning feedback. (Most of the time, XCode seems to simply try to match the beginning of a text fragment to "words" in the same document, without even using type information to try to determine the appropriateness of a suggested completion.)
Does anyone have ideas or tricks to make XCode approach Eclipse's cleverness, or to realistically develop Cocoa apps with other IDE:s than XCode?
EDIT: Worth keeping an eye on this: code.google.com/p/objectiveclipse/
The good news is, Apple’s working on the problem. One of the goals of the clang compiler project is to create a reusable parser which can be used for better code completion and refactoring support. Indications are that this has borne fruit in the latest Snow Leopard seeds.
Quite simply: no.
You can do almost everything by hand using your favorite text editor but it's not at all recommended. Try designing interfaces without Interface Builder for example.
My advice would be to just stick with Xcode and learn its way of doing things. Yes, it will be different and sometimes might not be "better" in your Eclipsed eyes. Console yourself in the fact that Apple's managed to release some great products using Xcode.
My personal experience is that, each time I use Xcode, I find a new trick which I can add to my bag. Xcode is far more full-featured than what you might think at first (or second) glance.
I've long voiced my rants about what's wrong with Xcode (and what's not wrong with Xcode). But you really don't want to use another tool. And without breaking NDA: Xcode 3.2 with SnowLeopard: Hooray. (Compared to what we have; not compared to what we might want.)
That said, to your original question about code completion, I personally turn off auto-completion in favor of on-demand completion. I find it far more useful and less distracting. In the Code Sense panel, set "Automatically Suggest" to "Never" and make sure the other two options are selected ("Show arguments in pop-up list" and "Insert argument placeholders...") This will do completion in a pop-up box when you hit Escape, making it easy to scroll through looking for what you want. I find that I have to type a lot less this way, especially for methods that are not unique for many characters. 80% of the time, it's highlighting the right thing already.
I have certainly felt your pain — as an experienced Java developer and frequent Eclipse user, I've wished for the same features myself. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of anything that fits the bill. I don't think there was any satisfactory resolution to this SO question, either.
However, I think you'll be quite happy with the improvements to Xcode code completion coming in Snow Leopard — it's vastly smarter about filtering the list of possible completions. Also, there are new conveniences for coding, such as inserting a starting bracket when you forgot one, etc. To my knowledge, there is still no predictive compiling like Eclipse, though.
Is anyone aware of an IDE other than Eclipse that supports predictive compiling and warning/error reporting? Does Eclipse itself support the feature for languages other than Java, such as C++? I'm led to wonder whether the fact that Java is built with independent .java files rather than .h and .c/.cpp/.m files makes it simpler to predictively compile. Also, anything compiled with gcc requires a little more care and attention than the comparatively simpler javac command. Any thoughts?
Check out JetBrains' new IDE called "App Code". It's still in the Early Access Program, but even with the Early Access bugs it is hands-down better than xcode 4.
http://www.jetbrains.com/objc/
emacs and/or vim
Xcode does have some context awareness, when you are sending a message to an object it will generally have the "ESC" list pull up meaningful arguments.
One thing I strongly recommend is looking into text macros. These are not really type aware, but they can save a ton of typing - for instance, after #implementation type "init" and then hit control-. (period) to activate the text macro. It will fill out a whole init method for you. You can create your own, or override the existing macros.