What’s this all about?
This is just a short collection of some useful Xcode 4/5 plugins I use. Most of us Cocoa developers, I guess, are looking about for making our development environment a more friendly and “warm” place with features enriching the development experience.
This list is far off being complete and will be extended permanently. So if you like it you should take a look at it from time to time.
UncrustifyX
Xcode plugin to uncrustify the source code opened in the editor.The goals of this project are simple: Create a highly configurable, easily modifiable source code beautifier.
XCFixins
This project includes plugins (known as fixins) that extend Xcode and fix some of its annoying behaviors.
Xcode_beginning_of_line
XCode 4 plugin to make HOME key jump to the first non-whitespace line of code.
Dash Plugin for Xcode
This plugin allows you to use Dash (I think, this is a Must-Have!) instead of Xcode’s own documentation viewer when using option-click (or the equivalent keyboard shortcut) to view the documentation for the selected symbol.
Exterminator
A magic button in Xcode to exterminate the current project’s DerivedData directories.
KSImageNamed
Xcode plug-in that provides autocomplete for imageNamed: calls.
ColorSense
Plugin for Xcode to make working with colors more visual. Every time when place the cursor on a UIColor/NSColor code fragment it will show the current color of this code as an overlay. By clicking this color overlay you can edit the value just with the standard OS X color picker.
Mini Xcode
This is a plugin that makes it easier to run Xcode without the main toolbar. It adds keyboard shortcuts for selecting the active scheme and device, and a compact popup menu in the window title bar that shows the currently selected run configuration.
Lin
Xcode4 plugin showing completion for NSLocalizedString andlocalizedStringForKey:value:table:.
XVim
XVim is a Vim plugin for Xcode. The plugin intends to offer a compelling Vim experience without the need to give up any Xcode features.
Fuzzy Autocomplete for Xcode
A Xcode 5 plugin that adds more flexible autocompletion rather than just prefix-matching.Please read also this very interesting article of the developer of this plugin about the way of reverse engineering Xcode with dtrace.
XToDo
A plugin to collect and list the TODO, FIXME, ???, !!!
ClangFormat
An Xcode plug-in to to use clang-format from in Xcode. With clang-format you can use Clang to format your code to styles such as LLVM, Google, Chromium, Mozilla, WebKit, or your own configuration.
VVDocumenter
Xcode plug-in which helps you write Javadoc style documents easier.I use this plugin constantly!
KFCocoaPodsPlugin
Xcode plug-in for CocoaPods with pod commands/console output, user notifications & code completion.
Alcatraz
Alcatraz is an open-source package manager for Xcode 5. It lets you discover and install plugins, templates and color schemes without the need for manually cloning or copying files. It installs itself as a part of Xcode and it feels like home.
SCXcodeMiniMap
SCXcodeMiniMap is a plugin that adds a source editor MiniMap to Xcode.
Conclusion
As we’ve illustrated above, some of the must have plugins and most popular. By sharing experiences we gained happiness, we hope to help improve apps built by our readers. There’s a lot more we’d like to share in future posts. If you have any thoughts or questions regarding plugins, don’t hesitate to contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.