24 Xcode Tips in 15 Minutes

In this video I walk through 24 quick Xcode tips to help you write code faster, build better tests, and navigate around large projects more efficiently - there’s something for everyone! Let me know your favorite Xcode tips in the comments below, or tweet me @twostraws 🙌
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00:00 Introduction
00:28 Generating class initializers
01:00 Environment overrides
01:52 Selecting blocks of code
02:10 Checking our spelling
02:59 Fixing all issues
03:20 Deleting search results
03:44 Resuming the SwiftUI canvas
04:18 Tiling the simulator
04:44 Expanding autocomplete
05:11 Quickly toggling breakpoints
05:37 Randomizing test order
06:14 Filtering the jump bar
07:03 Generating an interface file
07:45 Adding comments quickly
08:15 Finding files faster
08:42 Seeing source changes inline
09:29 Finding code in the minimap
09:59 Re-run your last test
10:30 Remapping unhelpful keys
11:41 Upgrading your searches
12:14 Reindenting code
12:37 Testing in-app purchases
13:37 Exploring build options
14:08 Pinning previews
15:06 Wrap up

[@AlanW]

"Which is useful for the NEVER times you want to print out your source" 🤣

[@techguy0711]

I like the triple slash comment that provides a description for a function or class when using autocomplete

[@robertmartens7839]

My tip is to always check your explanation first when I want learn something new with Swift.

[@yuriiohiria5559]

Awesome! Learned many new useful things! Thank you, Paul!

[@clith]

Loved the pinned previews tip! Very useful.

[@Aotearoas09]

Thanks. Something to learn and remember for the weekend.

[@AlanW]

0:28 was just something I was bemoaning about classes yesterday! Thanks!

[@DavidBobSmith]

I don’ t really have a favorite tip that you’ve gave they’re all good one. Thank you!

[@mohammadabuqubu7079]

Filtering the jump bar was life savior

[@acjazz01]

I loved that tip about generate initializers!

[@remyblas]

I'm about 2/3 into the 100 Days of Swift course and this is gold! First, because it will help me navigate and follow the projects quick and easily, and second, because I came here just curious, expecting not to understand most of it, but I do understand almost all of it, and that makes me feel like I really progressed in my understanding of iOS programming.

[@pieterbikkel]

Great tips, the auto spelling and grammar is my favorite

[@govind20246]

Initializer method is awesome 👍, thanks for sharing this!

[@thegoodshit1970]

That was so extremely useful, thank you very much Paul. Those were some pretty advanced pro tips there!

[@gakkieNL]

Great tips, some new ones here! Thanks 🙏

[@emilytomsUA]

Thank you for sharing, Paul!

[@gabrielc3303]

This is gold!!! Thank you so much Paul 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

[@MrShumylo]

Fantastic! So many useful tips. Cheers for this!

[@vladimirmoor]

BIG thanks for this huge amount of tips!

[@SmokeyMcMarF]

The spelling check and the extended mini map navigation will be a game changer in my daily developer routine. Thanks for the excellent video. You are an awesome guy.

[@craigdotfinance]

Fantastic video! Great tips in here.

[@chrispy104k]

Absolutely excellent Paul. My favourites: 1. In storyboard, Hold the Option key and then select the Source code file which makes sure that assistant editor is opened with the right file to make your connections 2. To go back to the file list no matter where the navigator panel is currently - Command + 1 3. Shift + Command + K to clean the build folder. Apparently Shift + Option + Command + K is supposed to perform a deeper clean. No idea if this is fact or fiction. 4. Command + R to run, Command + B to build 5. Mulit-position editing. Select the first location then hold Shift + Control then select the other locations to edit. Massive time saver. That should do for the moment.

[@tharindudarshana6480]

Very useful one 👏🏻. Thank you

[@mostafaelshazly6734]

Thanks Paul, Love the tips! Specially the one with testing in-app purchases, I used to waste so much time on those non-consumables

[@lennyedwards62]

Awesome video. Thank you

[@magedmohamed4622]

Thank you for your helpful explanation

[@adam-user]

Great video, thanks!

[@mattlarsen]

Favorite additional tips: CMD-Shift-Y to show/hide the debug area and Option-click on view controller when in the storyboard to display on screen and drag button actions over. Great series!

[@CraigSchubert]

Fantastic tips - thanks Paul! :-)

[@JonJudelson]

Multiline Editing in Xcode is one of the most mind blowing features I have ever seen.

[@volimpia]

My favorite Xcode shortcut is selecting part of code and choosing refactor extract it to method. Makes code so clearer.

[@imamad]

The interface maker shortcut was the best one for me! It's super helpful for code review and refactoring.

[@DigitalHole]

Thanks for sharing this.. Really cool tips & tricks.

[@naturereporter2719]

IAP testing in Xcode. Awesome! Ty for this vid.

[@theDaveBaxter]

Dbl click the brace is defo gonna help. Am forever scrolling up and down trying to find matching braces.

[@rednettle]

Paul you are a legend, thanks for sharing these, 10 years doing Xcode development and didnt know half of these - My current fave is "Run without building" when you just want to restart the app without re compiling "ctrl+cmd+r"

[@thephantom1237]

Thanks Paul. these will save a-lot of my time.

[@squarefrog]

So many good tips! I love the Structure > Move Selection Up or Down feature with cmd+opt+[ or cmd+opt+]. Works for both a single line of text, or many! Even more useful when writing SwiftUI

[@adlsfreund]

When was this added?

[@squarefrog]

@@adlsfreund the feature has been there for a long time. The shortcut appeared in 2014 I believe.

[@kaideumers6102]

These are really helpful!

[@danuff]

Thanks for these tips!

[@awakeFromNib]

Very useful, thanks!

[@asigivati1382]

wow impressive tips! i''m using xCode something like 6 years and i learned lot of good stuff here! thanks!

[@casperes0912]

Haven't watched alll the vid yet, so don't know If it comes up, but here's the best thing I ever did for myself in Xcode. I bound the Refactor->Rename option to F13. Now I just place the cursor over a variable or function name, F13, write new name, enter. Boom, renamed everywhere

[@_sabot]

Sounda pretty cool, unfortunately my Mac doesn't have F13 😢

[@AndreeMarkefors]

@@_sabot The Magic Keyboard with NumPad goes up to F19. X-Mas comes around sooner or later.

[@goalsandapps7847]

You got my thumbs up already after the very first tip.

[@Nilely]

Thanks. All tips are usefull. Tiling the simulator is most useful tip for me from all the new tips I learn.

[@thesalazar78]

Thank you for all the tips

[@BTFranklin]

These were so, so great.

[@smrkdr0]

Nice tips!

[@davidagyakwa288]

the best Swift and swift ui tutor there is 🔥

[@AngleIron426]

Excellent. Thank you.

[@mrvfino]

Thanks! I always suggest your website and content to newer iOS developers that i meet. It's a go to resource. Succinct yet still very informative.

[@onecarwood]

Very good tips!

[@prachibile2798]

Amazing tips

[@h3sperian]

Thanks for the tips, I learned 2-3 new life-savers ❤️ I like to move things, and so do I like to move code in my source file. Mostly when dragging around some piece of useful code ⌥ + CMD + [ -> move line up ⌥ + CMD+ ] -> move line down

[@luyokai]

Never thought I knew so little about Xcode until I watched this video.

[@satysin630]

I don't even use Xcode yet I just watched the whole video. Some super handy tips here, kinda makes me want to use Xcode 🙃

[@AndreyTorlopov]

Very useful. 🤘

[@MrRLO8]

Thanks Paul!

My tip: the disabled breakpoints also leaves a blue line on the right scrollbar. Just click twice in front of your actually important lines and work with a quick visible reference on the scrollbar. You can remove them after work done, from the Breakpoint Navigator.

[@romanpurishy]

Thanks, really helpful

[@abirhasanzoha1291]

Thanks for the tips. I really liked the spell checker as I do typo a lot. 😬

[@pkc456]

Great tips 👍

[@judy8821]

Great tips! Knew some of them. One tip for SwiftUI that I am careful to follow, is to not type too much code before building because the error messages don’t make sense so you can’t pinpoint which line of code is wrong until you start deleting all the lines you entered until you find the one.

[@josuecruz0921]

These are great 🔑

[@cruiseqe2]

Brilliant - thanks

[@trendz4422]

Thanks Paul

[@umairali7784]

Documenting a method shortcut is a great tip for me, hopefully I'll be doing it more often now on :)

[@AX100G]

The tip about adding init to classes is also useful for structs. the member wise init provided by the compiler is always “internal”. If you want a public one you can: Change your object from struct to class, use the Xcode refactoring tool to generate the init, change it back to a struct... and then make the generated init public.

[@AnthonyMarchenko]

⇧⌘J - select the visible file in project navigation, was a real discovery for our team. Really help to navigation throw complicated architecture try it! Cheers

[@Star-rq3jd]

Like all of it ✨

[@fernandomontes5087]

That indent shortcut is going to save me a lot of time.

[@robertmartens7839]

too bad you didn't guess it was there.

[@elbot441]

Its good but got a bad thing when using with swiftlint, If you have an empty space (between two line for readability ) it will add space and create a warning for swift lint

[@PaulPeelen]

Even better, there is an option in Xcode which will automatically re-indent on paste. You can find it in File > Preferences > Text editing > Indentation > Check "Re-indent on paste"

[@anotherguycalledsmith]

Thank you very much for #21 ;-)

[@sergiobost4891]

My favorite was 'Generating an interface file' - Awesome

[@trendz4422]

How its useful? IDK how to use it.

[@sergiobost4891]

@@trendz4422 it’s only really useful when browsing through others code, it’s gives you a birds eye view of what’s going on. Otherwise you would have to figure out what each component does and individually

[@noamif]

i've learnt so much from this man it's not even funny anymore

[@vamsi3877]

Thanks paul 👏

[@ivanlyuhtikov3871]

Cmd shift o - nice shortcut

[@danielwatson6529]

Code snippets library is my fave, i save all sorts in there

[@_sabot]

My tip for you guys is something some may know from the JetBrains IDEs. They have this little target icon above the file tree and if you press it, it will show you where the currently in the editor opened file is located in the file tree. This is very useful in large projects after you navigated in your editor by clicking on method names for example. I missed it so long in Xcode until I found out it has it too, but it's little bit more hidden. You have to right click in the editor, then -> Navigate -> Reveal in Project Navigator

[@ShinnyxAKAvincent]

Try CMD+Shift+J :)

[@_sabot]

@@ShinnyxAKAvincent 😲

[@volimpia]

Number 1 is lifesaver, thank you for this video. I will be using it and number 8. Some i didn't know about, some did. Can anyone recommend some videos about testing?

[@MarvelousLXVII]

Nice video.

[@mirkaram548]

No. 5 was that I was don't know before, that's really helpful. But what for i was hoping was "DUPLICATE CURRENT LINE", its really handy shortcut when when needed declaration of same type and modifier variable.

[@reachtorich]

Thanks for your amazing tips. BTW, could you please show me how to customize the Xcode appearance like yours?

[@dheerjdhiman4983]

Amazing

[@Cdswjp]

Great!

[@leaf_from_tree]

Thank you 👍❤️Спасибо

[@muntius8680]

Thanks.

[@leifashley]

Probably the best Xcode tips list I've ever seen. I knew like only 2 of these, so the rest were pure gold :)

[@30guarino]

Thank you! ..... Now we need one of your subscribers to have a print out for us lol

[@cyberrage8658]

Hey paul, how do you add the preview or simulator that when you change code it changed the app live like in swiftui

[@snakehound7678]

love it

[@guitaripod]

I knew all of them 😎

[@casadogaspar]

For the 8º I'm using Amethyst to tile the windows, so it's even easier. I know it's not part of Xcode but it's worth.

[@VinothKumar-zl2ht]

TIP 3: Double Click i searched lot. Thanks Paul..!!!

[@williamsquires3070]

Okay, but how can I force Xcode’s code editor to ALWAYS insert 2 spaces (or however many I want in the preferences) whenever I hit the key? This is super aggravating when I want to tab over an opening ‘{‘ and nothing happens. 😫 Even better, is there some way to have it put the open curly brace on the next line after a “func” declaration, and indented one level?

[@danielwatson6529]

oh yes!!

[@Sokrates8]

I love auto-indent --> ctrl-I ;-)

[@sirkastic]

My favourite is the 'Quicken' feature to help speed up builds. If you are finding build projects slow (especially Unity builds for me) press CMD + Q whilst XCode is buiilding the project and it will allocate more system resources to that task

[@wilmercb]

Please make a video on Swift UI MVVM programing 🙏🏼

[@dodilodi1278]

for tip No1, I find it more easy not to use the Editor, you can simply do right click on the class name -> refactor > generate membervise initializer

[@lucaseve]

Any tip for showing and hiding line numbers without to open the preferences?