It's nearly impossible to get away from Xcode entirely. You will always need the simulator and probably some entitlement / asset tools. What you can do is write the bulk of your app as an SPM package using your editor of choice, and then include that as a local or GitHub repo dependency in your Xcode shell app (which has no code, just assets, preview assets and plist files)
I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.
I feel like most Xcode free-swift setups still secretly depends on xcodebuild for anything real.
It's nearly impossible to get away from Xcode entirely. You will always need the simulator and probably some entitlement / asset tools. What you can do is write the bulk of your app as an SPM package using your editor of choice, and then include that as a local or GitHub repo dependency in your Xcode shell app (which has no code, just assets, preview assets and plist files)
https://www.swift.org/documentation/articles/zero-to-swift-e...
You could probably use Emacs for Swift...just like for about every other language.
Whether you still must download a monstrosity is left as an exercise for the reader.
I'm using flutter and had to download xcode to build the app so I guess it's a necessary step.
I had xcede[0] setup that worked well.
[0] https://codeberg.org/luxmentis/xcede
I use Xcode, but just to run the app with Command-R so I can see log messages or stack traces if I need to drop it into the agent for analysis. Everything else is done by Claude Code / Codex.
I even read the source using Zed not Xcode :)