Migrating from Eclipse to Xcode

Question

To Xcode xPerts: I've been doing Java in Eclipse for about 9 years, and I'm really used to powerful refactoring tools. There are several operations that I do all the time. I am looking for equivalents in Xcode, as it has better objective-c support than eclipse. (I'm not on my Mac as I write this, so some of them are from memory. I'm still very new to Xcode.)

1 "rename".

It looks like the Xcode equivalent for variables is “edit everything in scope”. Does this also work for files / classes / methods?

2 "extract local variable"

select the expression that creates the local var initialized by this expression. It even creates a usable name for the variable.

3 "extraction method"

select some code and it will create a method with this code and the corresponding parameters / return value.

4 "inline" (variable or method)

opposite the statement, embeds all or only the selected occurrence of the selected var or method.

5 "find next"

the appearance of the selected text. In eclipse, I can select the text and press ctrl-k to go to the next entry in the file. Similarly, shift-ctrl-k finds back. IIRC Xcode "find next" ignores the selection and uses only what is in the search field.

6 "signature change method"

This would be very useful with the syntax for the ocjective-c parameter messages with the name. This is great for adding parameters to a method.

7 "pull-up / push-down"

to move methods up or down the class hierarchy.

8 "move"

to move items around other classes, etc.

These are the ones that I use all the time. According to my estimates, these tools have reduced the encoding time in half. Are any of them supported in Xcode?

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Answer 1

You can read the Xcode user documentation on Refactoring on any computer. He will answer most of these questions.

Answer 2

For # 1, if you right-click on the symbol name, you should have a Refactor menu option that allows you to rename the ivar name, property, type name (including file names), etc.

Answer 3

Yes, right-click on the symbol and select "Refactoring".

There does not seem to be a “signature method of change". I have used this feature for many years in other IDEs. I assume that the only thing to do in xcode is to change the signature and hope that you get a compilation error for everything that needs to be changed ... not a great refactoring tool.

Xcode looks slippery in many ways, but there are some annoying omissions (does anyone want to view the contents of the collections in the debugger?)