Expanding Swift's IDE Support

This is a very welcome improvement but I should note the title is a bit clickbaity: using Swift on e.g. Cursor was always possible, it's just that after Microsoft banned forks from accessing the official VSCode marketplace last year you started having to workaround it by downloading and installing the .vsix file manually. Having the extension on the Open VSX Registry sorts this out so you can now install it via the proper way once more. Very happy this finally happened!

I'm building iOS apps without opening Xcode. All in VSCode and CLI build tools. This is excellent!

This is huge, long time coming. Interested to see if there is SwiftUI support.

I think swift is a really great language from the design perspective.

What makes it unusable outside the apple ecosystem imho is that while the C interop is amazing on paper, it sucks hard in practice due to the abomination of pointer types they build in.

The "all pointers are evil" attitude doesn't help when you want to use a C library and noone will write rewrite all these libraries.

Use swift as a scripting language without the slow start time:

Swift Caching Compiler - https://github.com/jrz/tools

But can I develop iOS apps with vim? As in, easy to execute commands for debugging, running app and tests?

i was hoping this was going to be AppCode rising from the grave but nah it's just more rebranded versions of VSCode. nothing new here

I recently started to enjoy working in Xcode more than before, using Swift. Not sure what changed, but it seems more responsive for lack of a better expression.

Now if only they'd open up iOS development so we can get AppCode back.

The primary thing keeping me away from trying it again is I have to use Xcode instead of my beloved JetBrains IDEs where I know all the keyboard shortcuts.

Is there an open—source Swift IDE that can modify itself without restarting? (written in Swift) I loved Oberon µSystems Oberon/F aka Component Pascal for that capability.

Or am I going to have to vibe-code one.

The loss of AppCode from Jetbrains was a huge blow to my motivation to continue working with Swift. Xcode just can't compare.

Everyone should post to open-vsx by default.

We’ve used SweetPad and it worked fine for us, so this doesn’t change much.

TLDR: same VScode extension now listed on OpenVSX registry, for Eclipse Theia et al.

But it's unclear if they tested it. For me, it fails basic configuration steps on the simplest project. Plugin compatibility between VSCode and others seems iffy.

Couple this with Xcode 26.4 AI lacking agentic features and you get Swift programmers being left behind.