Monday, February 14, 2011

Using Ingredients as Xcode documentation browser

Xcode 3.2.3 documentation browser was quite broken: ⌘ + ⌥ + double click on a method or function would open the documentation browser but would not scroll to the method you just asked documentation for. So I started to write an Xcode plugin to open Ingredients instead. Then Xcode 3.2.5 was released (I skipped version 3.2.4) and this annoying bug was fixed, so I did not bother to publish my plugin. But recently, I read on twitter that [RED4CTED] documentation browser was even more broken, so I decided it was time to release my Xcode-Ingredients plugin.

Note that the plugin is written for Xcode 3, so things have probably changed in [RED4CTED] (which I have not yet tried). If you are brave enough to use [RED4CTED], that you know a bit about Xcode plugins (@kodz, @rentzsch, @tjw?) and that you would like to use Ingredients for reading the documentation, please have a look and adapt the plugin for [RED4CTED]. In order to discover the searchForAPIString: method, I just set a breakpoint on makeKeyAndOrderFront: and looked at the backtrace, but I'm not sure if this technique is still applicable.

I will update this blog post as soon as someone can get the plugin to work with [RED4CTED].