AppCode + Keyboard Maestro

I love AppCode - for me it’s a much better development environment than Xcode. A few months ago I started to experience an issue where when an app crashed AppCode would hang for a time before showing the stack trace. I was also getting frustrated by the difference between Run and Debug. Run in AppCode doesn’t break into the debugger if something goes wrong.

Recently I’ve been editing code in AppCode and then building/running/debugging in Xcode. The tool that makes this a smooth process is Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com) - a true power-user tool.

I’ve created a couple of useful macros so far. They only apply to Xcode, AppCode and the Simulator so don’t interfere with keyboard shortcuts in other apps.

The first macro, called Run, tells Xcode to Run an app. So in AppCode I can hit CMD+R and Xcode will run my app.

The second macro, called Stop, tells the Xcode to stop the running app. This is bound to CMD+ESC.

What this means is that in addition to being able to run my app from AppCode (but actually getting Xcode to do it) I can also:

• Stop the running app by hitting a shortcut
• Re-run the app using CMD+R whilst using the simulator
• Both of the above save a tiny amount of time from having to switch back to Xcode or AppCode and make the whole process smoother.
• If you’ve never tried Keyboard Maestro, and love making yourself more productive, check it out!