Professional Xcode® 3

Chapter 6. Editing Text

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding editing windows and panes

• Navigating text and jumping between files efficiently

• Editing and reformatting text

• Using syntax-aware display and completion features

• Editing other types of files (Rich Text Format, property lists)

In the introduction, I mentioned that Xcode doesn't really do much of the actual development work. Most of the heavy lifting is performed by external tools — compilers, linkers, debuggers, and others — that are not part of the Xcode application, but Xcode does provide one critical tool that is integral to every developer's workflow: the text editor. You will spend far more time editing source files than doing almost any other single task. Learning how to edit efficiently and navigate your source files quickly will greatly enrich your productivity.

If you've spent any time at all using Mac OS X, you're familiar with the basic text editing concepts and commands. This chapter explores the powerful, and some obscure, extensions that Xcode adds to the core text editing facilities. It shows you a variety of techniques and shortcuts for navigating, editing, and reformatting text. Xcode also supplies a rich set of language-aware code formatting, coloring, and auto-completion features that make writing source code much more productive. Finally, this chapter touches on a number of ancillary topics like file encoding, localization, the spelling checker, and printing.

Xcode has, what seems like, a thousand features to ...