Question

Recently, I have started using Xcode 4 for developing iOS apps.

In Xcode intellisense’s autocomplete box, there are some letters in colored boxes before every suggestion. I know that they represent the property of the word we are typing like f,T,C,M,P,C,K,# etc.

Is there some kind of glossary available to find their quick meanings?

Meanings of f,C,T,# are understandable (function, class etc) but there are many others which I dont know. I assume these letters are standard across all IDEs like Visual Studio, Netbeans etc. Correct me if I am wrong.

Please suggest.

Answer 1

In Xcode this is called “Code Sense”. And these icons also exist in Xcode 3. These icons are also used in symbol navigation.

Red: macros

• = macro (think #define)

Brown: Core Data / namespace

• = modeled class
• = modeled method

• = modeled property

• = C++ namespace

Orange: aliased types

• = Objective-C category
• = enum
• = typedef / typealias
• = Swift extension

Green: variables

• = binding
• = function
• = field
• = constant
• = local variable
• = IBOutlet
• = variable (can be ivar, global var, local var, etc.)
• = parameter (think f(x))

Blue: methods

• = IBAction
• = method
• = property

Purple: aggregate types

• = class (Objective-C, Swift or C++)
• = class extension
• = Objective-C/Swift protocol
• = struct
• = union

Gray: snippets

• = snippets

Icons: #pragma mark or comments

• = !!!: ...
• = FIXME: ...
• = ???: ...
• = TODO: ...
• = MARK: ...

You should be able to look up the meanings from the filenames from /Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Resources/Xcode.SourceCodeSymbolKind.*.Icon.tiff*.

In later versions of Xcode, the path is moved to /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTFoundation.framework/Resources/Assets.car, see Analysing Assets.car file in IOS on how to extract the images from the *.car