Question

This question is for reference purposes.

In the “Fonts & Colors” tab of the Settings window of Xcode, there’s a setting for documentation comments (and keywords)? What are they?

Answer 1

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Documentation comments are just (Objective-C) comments marked as documentation. They are treated the same way as normal comments, except that you can set another color and font in Xcode. Some documentation software may even use these comments to create automatically documentation from given header files and other source code.

Documentation comment keywords are keywords that give semantical meaning to text that follows after the keyword in a documentation comment.

You can create inline documentation comments with three slashes (instead of two in normal comments), and block doc. comments with two stars instead of one (instead of one in normal comments). Example:

// Normal inline comment
/// Documentation comment

/* Normal block
comment */
/** Documentation block
comment */

You can create documentation comment keywords by specifying a keyword (one word only) after the “at” symbol. Example:

- (void)sendMessage: (id)sender;
/// @description Sends the receiver.
/// @available Version 1.0 through 2.2

Appledoc is a tool for creating a documentation set from your source code (including documentation comments and method signatures) and getting it to install and reload inside Xcode when needed. It’s a command-line program and has instructions for how to incorporate it into your Xcode build process.

Once you have a documentation set you can add it to Xcode via Preferences > Downloads > Documentation.

The special keywords starting with an @-sign is also called HeaderDoc tags. A list of them can be found in the HeaderDoc User Guide. Please note that some of them are Objective-C and some are C++.