A lightweight Swift workflow with Zed

I played with Swift over the weekend, and Xcode felt sluggish at times on my machine. I also had to ask Codex for help quite often just to navigate its UI.

When I tried coding in Zed, it failed to recognize structs, variables, and similar symbols defined in other project files.

A quick Google search led me to a very helpful blog post, “How I Got Zed Editor Working with Swift Projects,” and a GitHub repository: xcode-build-server.

Following the instructions in the blog post, I installed xcode-build-server and generated a buildServer.json file with the following command:

xcode-build-server config -scheme SCHEME_NAME -project PROJECT_NAME.xcodeproj

Zed could now recognize the project's symbols.

I wanted to use the simulator without opening Xcode. After some trial and error, I got hot reload working too. Here's how:

• Navigate to the project directory and run open -a Simulator.
• Run xcodebuild to build the codebase as an .app bundle.
• Run xcrun to install and launch the built bundle in the simulator.

I've shared the Bash script I'm using in a GitHub Gist. Update the project name, scheme, directories, and other values as needed, then install fswatch to watch for file changes. Now you can run this command and have fun:

open -a Simulator && dev.sh