I don't have any experience developing iOS or Cocoa applications, but I imagine that you need to use at least some of the XCode toolchain to make those things happen.

You need the compilers/toolchain from Xcode, but there are third-party build tools, such as e.g. Buck[1] that combined with an decent editor, let you pretty much avoid the Xcode GUI for a lot of the development cycle.

[1]https://buckbuild.com/

you said "a lot of the development cycle", as someone who hates Xcode I worry that won't be enough (not making anything requiring compilation on mac at moment, so not particularly worried)

If you don't use Interface Builder, you can actually avoid Xcode completely.

Everyone I ask says that using Emacs for ios development is impractical. If anyone knows different please share the details.

Well, if you're willing to buy RubyMotion:

http://www.rubymotion.com/

I made an iOS app using vim and Lua (via wax - https://github.com/alibaba/wax). Obviously needed the xcode toolchain for compilation and libraries but always from the CLI / scripts.

Getting the code building with M-x compile should be fairly straightforward.

For deployment + debugging, you could try this: https://github.com/phonegap/ios-deploy

Looks like it runs lldb itself, but perhaps with a bit of work you could get it to interact with gud-mode?

But no software even close to Visual Studio, that's the point.

what?

jetbrains.com (intellij, appcode, pycharm,webstorm, rubymine etc)

sublime text atom vim emacs eclipse

Not even close to Visual Studio on Windows, that's the point (I know I'm repeating, but it's sad that I'm having to do that).

Intellij eats Visual Studio for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Twice. Every day.

To make VS somewhat usable, you need Resharper - made by the company, that makes Intellij.

Intellij is amazing. Note that jetbrains built resharper to de-suckify Visual Studio. And many of the refactorings that we all take for granted were invented by Jetbrains.

Intellij is fairly close as an IDE to Visual Studio on Windows. It's sad you are not seeing it.

And that without mentioning ReSharper which enhances VS quite a bit.

Quite a few people would respond to that by saying:

> There are like nine different versions of Emacs for OS X...

Is there anyone preventing anyone from making something 'close to Visual Studio' though?

I don't think Apple is blocking that. If you're looking for something for iOS/Mac dev, all the build tools are available as command-line interfaces.

No one is stopping 'in theory', but may be because there's no IDE close enough to Visual Studio for making something close enough to Visual Studio stopping people? ;)

Tried to buy a Visual Studio license for porting our game to Windows Phone last year. Ended up paying $2K for a version that was able to build WP apps, but not allowed to release them.

VS + VA used to be fantastic, today it's just a piece of ... overpriced crap.

But maybe expecting more from $2K+ software (VS) than from FREE software (xcode) is wrong.

Not sure what you are talking about. Visual Studio Express allows Windows phone development for free. Of course, for releasing they charge money (much lesser than what Apple charges).