One-Stop Xcode Coziness
As iOS Developers, we will spend most of our time in front of IDE, and for most of the majority IDE, Xcode is the choice.
Xcode comes with a lot of features, to make sure iCode Development (yeah I called it iCode that stands for iOS, Mac, TvOS, and WatchOS) fast and smooth but that’s still a lot of room for improvement.
Code Coloring
Speaking of coziness, one of the significant aspects is what you look at, and how code represents to you will determine how coziness you feel. Xcode support `Code Coloring` very well, but I find out that Xcode Template Theme doesn’t maximize it’s potential.
Most of it if not all, Xcode theme doesn’t put any attention to Code Coloring of several types like Class name, function name, constant or etc which means you will not easily notice this by just looking your code.
The best way to utilize this by change all this color based on its type and you will easily distinguish your code.
With these changes, you will easily distinguish Function, Class and other just by the color of it which will help to debug, understand the code or just really beautiful to look.
Logic Operator Visualization
Did you ever find yourself use == or another logic operator? Sure, you do. This logic operator is based on logic in most of all code. This logic operator will work, but what if we could create a more readable logic operator. Welcoming Ligature.
Ligature is where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English — Wikipedia.
In a nutshell, using ligature, we can create new characters that represent our logic operator, not just for creating new characters, but give more readable and understandable characters. Read logic operator like —
<=, -> , != , |>— our brain will read this character as two entities (or more based on character count) and not a whole as meaning, and it takes time for our brain to encoded this character and get the meaning of it which will need more energy hence you will get hungry a lot faster 🤣.
For folks out there who use functional programming, it will help to simplify several operators like |> or >>>.
There’s a lot of programming ligature fonts out there, from free one like Fira Code, Hasklig to paid one like PragmataPro. You can explore these fonts at ProgrammingFonts, you can adjust what font you like, for me I will use Fira Code.
Install Fira Code is like installing other fonts, download the TTF, and install it. You can refer to FiraCode Installation Guide.
Freebies
Long story short I created an Xcode Theme that implements Code Coloring and Ligature Font, I called it Yolo-theme. So you don’t need to do it yourself.
You can check yolo-theme at my GitHub here :
Conclusion
As a Developer, we should enjoy our time writing our code. As we enjoy our time writing our code, we will produce a more positive outcome of our code and productive manner. All positive things come up when we enjoy and passionate about writing code.
There are several ways to create an enjoyable code experience, and one of them is how you can create an enjoyable IDE that helps you be more productive instead of hinder you.
