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Customizing Your Work Environment

You can work most efficiently when your development environment complements the way you like to work. Xcode provides many options for customizing its interface, from setting the keystrokes for menu and text-editing equivalents, to configuring the contents and layout of the project window, to setting conventions for editing code.

In this section:

Preferences
Customizing the Xcode User Interface
Working in a Shell

Preferences

The Xcode Preferences window is the key to customization, and you should spend some time investigating it. It provides access to settings for features such as text editing, syntax coloring, indentation, navigation, building, debugging, source code management, and key bindings for menus and text editing. To learn more about Xcode’s Preferences, see “Xcode Preferences.”

Customizing the Xcode User Interface

You can customize Xcode’s project window and many other windows too. For example, Xcode provides a number of different project window configurations, or layouts, for you to choose from. You can embed an editor and specify which columns and groups should be shown in the project window. You can also customize toolbars and menus, and control the amount of information shown in the Build Results window.

Working in a Shell

Mac OS X incorporates the FreeBSD variant of UNIX, which includes a command-shell environment. The Terminal application provides an interface for invoking command-line utilities and executing shell scripts. You can build Xcode projects from a shell with the xcodebuild command, in order to, for example, run nightly builds. For more information, see “Building From the Command Line.”

Xcode also makes it easy to execute shell scripts as part of your development work. You can execute selected text as a shell script or run scripts from the User Scripts script menu. That menu contains default scripts that you can execute as is, or use as examples for scripts you write. You can also write shell scripts that Xcode executes during the build process.

For more information on modifying your work environment and working with shell scripts in Xcode, see “Customizing Xcode.”

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