Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Xcode 4: Open Quickly in Assistant Editor

A consequence of Xcode 4’s single-window interface is that opening a file shows it in an existing pane rather than in a new window. Xcode normally picks the main editor pane, which can be annoying. Often, I’m looking at a source file and want to open its unit test file next to it. When I choose “Open Quickly” from the File menu, Xcode opens the test file on top of the source file. I expected that holding down the Option key would change the menu item to something like “Open Quickly in Assistant Editor,” but it doesn’t. However, Kevin Ballard has a great tip: when you’re in the “Open Quickly” window, you can hold down the Option key when clicking the Open button to open the file in the assistant editor. You can also hold down Option-Shift to choose which editor, tab, or window to open it in.

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Josua Pedersen

It seems like that is a universal way of displaying/opening views in Xcode 4. I used it to display a previous debug log in the assistant editor, very useful.

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