4 Xcode shortcuts to boost your productivity for SwiftUI

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Table of Contents

Leaning tips and tricks about the tool will help you down the road. Today, I will show you 4 Xcode shortcuts that I find helpful when dealing with SwiftUI.

Leaning tips and tricks about the tool will help you down the road. Today, I will show you 4 Xcode shortcuts that I find helpful when dealing with SwiftUI.

Refresh Canvas

SwiftUI Preview is an excellent tool for creating and updating a view, but if you type code too fast, Xcode might stop updating the preview, and you will see the dialog to resume the live preview.

Xcode can stop live updating, but you can resume by tap the resume button.

Reach to that Resume button all day might be annoying. But there is a shortcut for that.

To resume automatic preview update, you use this shortcut.

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + p or
Editor menu > Canvas > Refresh Canvas

This will refresh your preview and start automatically update again.

Press command + option + p keys to trigger refresh canvas.

Re-Indent

By nature, SwiftUI likely to contains many indentations. Each view and each modifier mean another level of indentation. Writing a complex view might leave un-aligned indents in your code. You can format that with the re-indent command.

To do that, you use the following shortcut.

⌃ – control + i or
Editor menu > Structure > Re-Indent

Re-indent only applies to the line your cursor is focusing, so you might need to select all the code (⌘ - command + a) before using re-indent command.

control + i to re-indent your code.

Move line up / Move line down

View Modifier

The order of view modifier is very important in SwiftUI. Changing the order means changing in behaviors and appearance.

The following code will add a padding around the text view, then add background color to both the text view and padding.

Text("SwiftUI")
    .padding()
    .background(Color.yellow)

While the following will only add a background color to the text view.

Text("SwiftUI")
    .background(Color.yellow)
    .padding()

Add padding before background color (Left) and add background color before a padding (Right).

When working with SwiftUI, you will find yourself copying and pasting the view modifier around to get the result you want. Xcode has two commands to move code up and down, which might save you time copying and pasting if you use multiple modifiers.

To move line of code up:

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + [ or
Editor menu > Structure > Move Line Up

To move line of code down:

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + ] or
Editor menu > Structure > Move Line Down

These commands will move a focusing line of code up and down.

command + option + [ or ] to move a line of code up and down.

View modifier is not the only thing we move. The view itself is another thing that we regularly move around when working in SwiftUI. It is very easy to compose views in SwiftUI. Most of the time, you will rearrange your view using VStack or HStack, and that's mean changing view position means moving your view's code up and down in a stack view.

We can also move a chunk of codes by highlight all the code you want and then use the Move line up / Move line down command.

To move multiple lines of code up, you highlight the code and then use the following shortcut.

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + [ or
Editor menu > Structure > Move Line Up

To move multiple lines of code down:

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + ] or
Editor menu > Structure > Move Line Down

Highlight the code and press command + option + [ or ] to move multiple lines of code up and down.

Show/Hide SwiftUI Preview

SwiftUI Preview is good, but it takes too much space. Apart from working with a view, you usually want it close.

To toggle SwiftUI Preview, you use this shortcut:

⌘ - command + ⌥ - option + ⏎ Return or
Editor menu > Canvas

Show/Hide SwiftUI Preview with command + option + return shortcut.

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