Xcode 4 code editor questions

Question

How can I turn on curly brace matching?

• This worked fine in Xcode 3.x. In Xcode 4 is doesn't work. I've already checked the box for "Automatically insert closing '}'" in the Preferences->Text Editing->Editing panel.

How can I turn on parenthesis matching?

How can I turn on code compeletion for "if/else-if", "for" etc?

• In Xcode 3.x I would start to type "for" and autocomplete would provide the parenthesis, curly braces, semi-colons etc. I could then press escape for a menu containing (amongst other things) the option to do a "for i" loop (in which case Xcode would fill in "int i; i < n; i++" with n selected so I could just type a value).

• In Xcode 3.x I could do something similar for if/else-if blocks. I could just start to type "if" and autocomplete would provide parenthesis, curly braces etc.

Edit: after looking for the "get info" option for a source code file (was simply right click the file name in Xcode 3) for five minutes I decided to downgrade to version 3.2.x. Which means hours of downloading. This really stinks :-(

Answer 1

Auto-} works a little differently in Xcode4. It doesn't appear as soon as you type the {. You have to hit return after to get the closing brace. So typing { gives the autocomplete. It feels a little odd at first, it took me awhile to adjust, but I think it makes sense. Most coding styles dictate a return after the opening brace, so it pretty much will always auto-close when you want it to. It doesn't give the } though in a case like making a single line if into a multi-line one. You can now add in the opening brace, move the curser to after the line, and enter the closing brace. Before when I did something like that I'd have to spend time deleting the auto-}.

For code completion, it sounds like you're having an indexing issue. Code completion still works as you want (it's actually a lot smarter now) in Xcode4. Your syntax coloring is also usually off when this happens. I ran into it with one of my projects and fixed it by editing my build settings, I had a bad one in it. You might also try deleting the project's derived data in the organizer. That'll force a rebuild of the index.

The "get info" items have moved. It's one of the land mines of the IDE rewrite. They're not in the file inspector. Show the utilities pane and then select the file inspector (the first icon in the tab bar).

Xcode 4 is a bit alien when coming from Xcode 3. They changed a lot of stuff. I'd recommend getting a feel for it. At some time in the near future Xcode 3 will be deprecated and you won't get the new SDks for it. You can have Xcode 3 and 4 both installed at once which is helpful for making the switch. That way you can fall back to Xcode 3 when you get stuck on something and will allow you to gradually make the change.