Prior to using Alcatraz, I didn’t realize how much of my productivity was going to waste. I mean, I always knew there were Xcode plugins that could make life easier; it’s just that I didn’t realize how much easier. Please don’t make the same mistake I did. Take advantage of plugins.

Alcatraz is a popular package manager for Xcode. It’s easy to install and it has a very nice GUI window for picking/downloading a variety of cool plugins.

I’m only using two plugins right now, and they’re amazing: Fuzzy Autocomplete and XVim.

Fuzzy Autocomplete extends the functionality of Xcode’s default autocompletion when you type in prefixes of certain keywords.

e.g. Say you’re writing methods for UITableViewDataSource; by default, Xcode’s autocomplete will show you the following ONLY if you type in “func tableView…”:

func tableView(tableView: UITableView, cellForRowAtIndexPath indexPath: NSIndexPath) -> UITableViewCell

However, with Fuzzy Autocomplete, you can type in “cellForRow…” and it will recognize the same function for you. No more scrolling endlessly through Xcode’s autocompletions!

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XVim is a plugin to simulate the Vim interface on Xcode. It’s totally badass and I never thought I could achieve this functionality before. If you’re into Vim, this is definitely the plugin for you.

Additionally, I’m running a custom script from SwiftLint that’s improved my coding style via providing warnings whenever my code seems messy or dangerous. I never knew about this sort of on-the-fly linting until SwiftLint, so it’s made my coding experience a lot more interesting.

You can say for sure that I’m really happy with my development environment right now :) If you’re comfortable and bored with the Xcode environment, go spice it up with plugins!