alt Hacker NewsOT: Rant
Xcode being loaded on my computer causes something akin to a kernel panic.
Not the fun kind where you get to read a backtrace and feel something. The existential kind.
Every time it hijacks a .json or .xml file association, I experience a rage that hasn't been matched since the Emacs/vi wars ... and at least those were about editors that could open in under a geological epoch.
I just want to look at a text file with pretty print.
I do not need a 12GB IDE to render curly braces. cat has been doing this since 1971. Dennis Ritchie solved this.
Why, Apple, in 40 years, could you not ship a lightweight dev-oriented text viewer? You had NeXTSTEP. You had the DNA of the most elegant Unix workstation ever built.
And you gave us... this behemoth? An app whose launch time rivals a full Gentoo stage 1 install ( see: https://niden.net/post/gentoo-stage-1-installation )
TextEdit is not the answer.
I've used Xcode for native iOS development and honestly, once you get past the Stockholm Syndrome phase, it's just fine.
- The interface is learnable.
- The debugger mostly works.
But the load times -- on every high-end MBP I've ever owned -- suggest that somewhere deep in the Xcode binary, there's a sleep(rand()) that someone committed in 2006 and no one has had the courage to git blame.
FWIW, I fear someone here tells me I've been missing a launch flag. Alas, it's my truth and I can't hold it in anymore.
Replies
I'm confused, how have you not reassociated the files with the app of your choosing? Is Xcode somehow changing associations back? Does it do it only at updates?
As far as Apple providing anything, why are they the expected ones providing it? There are a gigabazillionumpteen text editors that can reformat JSON. I have Xcode, and have associated JSON with a different editor. Not once has it ever changed on me.
Is this the time for a random Xcode rant? The topic is agentic AI in Xcode.
I'd be a lot more interested in hearing what people think about this development, what it means for code privacy, how are the context windows handled, can it be enabled per-project, etc.
There was a time I was interested in building for MacOS. Installing, opening and trying to use Xcode killed that pretty quick. I've never seen an IDE this behind in terms of usability from the competition.
It's interesting seeing people complain about the load times of XCode, as someone who uses VSCode and has loved the instant load times, I think the people over at MSFT have been listening a bit as the latest version of Visual Studio has finally managed to fix some of their problems with the thing taking upwards of 10-20 seconds to load. Visual Studio 2026 now loads "almost" as fast as VSCode, which is great! Now they just need to make project loading faster.
I agree with you, it's infuriating. I think it's been loading faster recently (maybe?), but it still takes like 10 seconds.
To set file association stuff more easily than with the Finder GUI, you can run (with https://github.com/moretension/duti):
duti -s com.apple.textedit public.${whatever} all
The hijacking of file associations is one of the most awful and malicious things about macOS. You can set it to whatever you want, when Apple decide they want to, your CSVs will go to Numbers, JSONs go to Xcode.
> sleep(rand())
You're being too kind. It feels like a 8 cores worth of parallel busy loops to me!
I bet Alan Dye insisted they put it in there so users can pause their busy to gaze at and appreciate his artistically minimal unpainted Liquid Glass window frame.
I like how Xcode installs a bunch of gigantic, multi-gigabyte artifacts for like ios runtimes or whatever, fills up the hard drive, can't update because it's out of space, and then tells me I'm not allowed to delete them because of SIP.