swiftpaper

Sets up a nice little environment for Swift scripting in VSCode.

Questions

Why?

Because sometimes you're not about setting up an entire XCode project to write some Swift.

But isn't that what executable Swift packages are for?

I mean, yeah, but it's a conceptual difference. When you just want to script a bit of logic in Swift, you're not trying to write a whole package. It's like jotting down notes from a meeting, but making sure you bind the signatures in your hard-bound notebook first.

Why not just open a Swift playground?

... Again, it's the concept. And you can't debug and compile a .playground file.

So what does swiftpaper actually do?

It sets you up a simple, debuggable, buildable environment to write your Swift in VSCode.

Doesn't the Swift extension for VSCode already do that?

As it turns out, no. As of time of writing, the Swift extension provides Swift language support and an automated pipeline for setting up LLDB to debug Swift packages. The CodeLLDB extension is what does the heavy lifting, and the Swift extension is only set up to let it work on packages. If you're looking to debug Swift in any other context--building an app, writing a command line utility, etc.--the Swift extension won't help you.

Does this work in Xcode?

Look--that's on the list. For now this is for VSCode.

Setup

Clone the repo and add it to your path.

Documentation

If you forget anything, just run swiftpaper in the command line. For example:

swiftpaper

It'll walk you through everything.

Use

Create a new directory, navigate into it, and run swiftpaper init. Like this:

cd
mkdir newProject
cd newProject
swiftpaper init

Customization

If you want to tweak the setup, you have three options:

1. Fork the repo
2. Create a ~/.swiftpaper_before file
3. Create a ~/.swiftpaper_after file

~/.swiftpaper_before and ~/.swiftpaper_after get sourced before and after swiftpaper sets up the environment, so they're good places for anything you want to happen apart from what's in the box.

For example, say you want to symlink a stock .swift-format and .swiftlint.yml, add both to .gitignore, and open a git repo. ~/.swiftpaper_after can handle all of that:

ln -s $HOME/Repos/shDotFiles/.swift-format
ln -s $HOME/Repos/shDotFiles/.swiftlint.yml

echo .swift-format >> .gitignore
echo .swiftlint.yml >> .gitignore

git init &> /dev/null

Etc.

There's not much else. Happy Swifting!