Here’s some good news for iOS/macOS developers who are also Emacs users. Until now, the only reasonable way to develop for iOS was to use Apple’s Xcode. Xcode is a perfectly good editor and has the necessary integration to make it easy to develop for iOS but it’s not Emacs. I’m pretty sure that most Emacs users would consider it a tax on iOS development.
Now, thanks to Mikael Konradsson, there’s an alternative. For the last couple of years, Konradsson has been working on moving Swift development to Emacs. That’s harder than you might think because he also had to provide the interfaces to the previewers, simulators and build tools that are important in iOS development. It even has an interface to the Apple documentation system.
Take a look at his post to see a list of its features. His GitHub repository has even more information. Konradsson describes it as still Alpha quality software but he has been using it for his own development during those two years. One of the commenters asked if it was on Melpa and Konradsson said that he felt it needed to mature a bit more first. The paranoid may therefore want to wait a bit but it’s hard to see any harm in checking it out.
One of the reasons I’ve never ventured into iOS development—despite occasional itches to do so—is that the thought of learning and navigating the Xcode system seemed too daunting. Even using Konradsson’s package, it probably wouldn’t be easy for the newcomer, but at least it would be Emacs. I’ll be interested to see how this package plays out. If it lives up to its author’s description, it could be a game changer for Emacs iOS developers.
Update : Fixed link.