I've just started some iPhone development and so, at the moment, I'm forced to use xcode. It is an awful editor/IDE. Simply the worst I've used since.... Well.... MPW.

I'm looking for an alternative. ANYTHING to use instead (preferably slickedit, or something like that). Can anyone recommend something that I can use that DOESN'T EVER require xcode to be started.

The debugger is terrible. The editor is slower than molases with a file greater than 1M. "Showing Assembly Source" takes about 30 seconds to a minute to open one of the source files. It's just awful. How the hell do you guys put up with this?

At work, I use visual studio. Not exactly the best editor but far better than xcode, especially when combined with visual assist. I use an external debugger as I'm doing PS3 development. Oh man, if only someone would come up with a debugger like that for other platforms.... But I digress.

Please, any alternative would help. I'm considering setting it up so I can do an SSH login from visual studio to do the compile. I did this when working on a project that only had a linux build available.

Please help. It's driving me nuts. It's *so* bad.

Not for iPhone development. I know, XCode very different from Visual Studio - lots of hidden features, and totally different layout etc.

It's very unforgiving for beginners.

Anyway, there's no real alternative for Cocoa/Mac/iPhone

xcode is the best you can get on mac....
there are times when I wish there was xcode for linux.. seriously.. comparing to kdevelop/anjuta xcode is gold.
of course it doesn't fly comparing to VS, but it's not _much_ worse.
i personally find xcode gdb integration ok.. as for large files / asm source, 've never had that problem.
again, it took me a bit to get used to xcode, and I kind-of like it now actually

Do you have any hints/tips on how to make the GDB integration at least stable?

I'm finding the following:

1. GDB doesn't like assembly. Especially if a stack frame isn't set up.

2. It is *very* slow. Like 4 seconds for a single step. Why? How? Are they sending the data in morse code over a 28.8K modem? We're on USB link to the iphone, a single step should take <<100ms!!! not 4000.

3. It is very unstable. Seems to detach very easily from the iphone.

4. How do you show some disassembly? Not attached to a function, just happens to be somewhere in memory?

5. How do you declare a watch window?

I wholeheartedly agree with you regarding the linux solutions. They're pretty awful. But you get what you pay for. My first run in with Eclipse was with the initial PS3 dev environment and it was absolutely awful (8 seconds+ for a single step).

Eclipse is pretty daft too. If you so happen to have a 50M log file in the same directory as your project, eclipse would take about 20 seconds to just open. Daft!

So ummmm why don't you just USE slickedit?? Just set up Slickedit as an alternative editor in Xcode. It looks simple enough (haven't done it myself but the Google book search makes it look easy). Of course you don't want Xcode to EVER be started so I guess that's not an option for you.

I've developed on Windows, Linux and other mobile devices before. I must say that Xcode is an excellent IDE. You just need to get used to working on a Mac. It's a completely different environment. As for it's speediness, did you ever stop and think you might need a faster computer???

And to answer your question, NO.