Mattias’ bits and bytes

Xcode 3.X: Stepping through warnings/errors

April 29, 2008 @ 11:25

Since we’re humans, we sometimes make mistakes. This might happen during coding too; when trying to build the compiler will spit out some warnings and errors if we’ve done something wrong.

Now Xcode has a keyboard binding that will open up the editor and show the last build’s next warning/error (this shortcut is command + =). This is a very useful key combo (except that it doesn’t go to the first warning/error once you’re at the last warning), but Apple could do better than this.

In my day-to-day development, I’d rather fix all the errors first, and then step through the warnings. This could be solved in a number of ways (each such is, afaik, not implemented in Xcode today):

Update: Howard Moon enlightens me on the xcode-users mailing list; if you toggle the “Select this to show or hide existing warnings” button in the build tab, the above mentioned key combo will step through errors only. This is better, but still not perfect (I cannot step through warnings only, and I did have to use the mouse again…).

1. Have two key combos; say that “command + =” will cycle forwards through errors, and “command + shift + =” will cycle forward through warnings. This way, I could cycle through all errors first and then test run my program, without fixing the warning (of course, you should always strive after fixing all errors as they appear in your code)
2. Have the possibility to let todays key binding first step through each error, and then through the warnings (like a queue with all errors first, followed by the warnings).

Since I really want/need this functionality, I’ve filed a request over at Cupertino. It’s available at rdar://5897018 for you lukcy bastards with access privileges to Apple’s bug database.

Tags: binding, error, keyboard, shortcut, step, warning, xcode