Customizing Xcode

The Xcode development environment does its best to provide an easy, intuitive interface for the most common development tasks that you face. However, there are many different factors that affect your requirements for your development environment. Luckily, Xcode is also a very flexible tool, providing many different ways to customize the development process.

The following chapters describe many of the ways in which you can customize Xcode to make it a more productive and custom-tailored environment for your development. Some features are of particular use to developers who are familiar with BBEdit, CodeWarrior, or MPW, but most should be useful to any developer.

In particular, these chapters show you how to customize Xcode’s user interface, change user settings with Xcode Preferences, and add functionality to the Xcode application using the User Scripts menu. In addition, many of the chapters that appear in previous sections of this document also describe ways in which you can use Xcode to customize your development environment. It does not describe how to extend the Xcode application.

Xcode offers many opportunities for customization, including:

• Customizing the build process. Xcode provides many different ways for you to customize the behavior of the build system. The Copy Files and Run Script build phases, described in Build Phases, let you add your own operations to the build process for a target; Build Rules let you customize the way in which files in a target’s build phases are processed. You can use Shell Script targets to add reusable custom operations to the build process; external targets let you build using an external build tool of your own choice. See Special Types of Targets. You can also invoke xcodebuild from shell scripts to automatically build one or more products.

• Setting Command-Line Arguments and Environment Variables shows how to set environment variables that are available to your executable when running in the Xcode development environment.

• Using Smart Groups to Organize Files describes how to use smart groups to organize the files of a large project.

• Project Window Layouts describes how to customize the configuration of the project window and other Xcode windows.

• Customizing Key Equivalents shows you how to set Command-key equivalents for menu items and keyboard equivalents for common editing tasks.

• Using Scripts To Customize Xcode describes how to use shell commands and scripts to customize your programming environment.