13 Xcode Shortcuts to Boost Your Productivity

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Developers often spend most of their working hours on an IDE. If you’re an iOS, macOS, tvOS or watchOS developer, you’d probably be closer to your Xcode IDE than anything else at work.

I’ve often heard developers giving excuses to for not learning Xcode shortcuts when they’re starting out. In their defense, they have a valid argument:

If you don’t remember shortcuts, using a mouse at least helps you get work done quickly. Moreover, learning shortcuts feels like an additional learning curve especially when you’re getting started.

To shed some light on the impact keyboard shortcuts can have on a developer’s productivity, I’d share the findings of a study with them:

If your job requires you to be working with an IDE for eight hours a day, then using keyboard shortcuts can save you eight working days every year.

Eight days is a lot of time. By dedicating just a few hours a day, you can become proficient at using keyboard shortcuts in Xcode and save that extra week. Being productive with shortcuts would let you focus on bigger tasks at hand and speed up your development and workflow.

In the next few sections, we’ll walk through lots of Xcode keyboard shortcuts that I found useful. I hope they help you improve your efficiency as a developer too.