June 3, 2026
Emacs Strikes Back
Building iOS Apps with Doom Emacs
He ditched Apple’s app-maker tool, and the comments are loving, roasting, and side-eyeing it
TLDR: A developer says he built and shipped an iPhone app without really using Apple’s main app tool, relying instead on a custom Emacs setup. Commenters were split between impressed keyboard-warrior praise, complaints about laggy editor features, and a sharp side debate over whether the article itself felt AI-written.
A developer just pulled off the kind of stunt that makes keyboard diehards cheer and everyone else ask, wait, you can do that? Instead of using Apple’s usual app-building program, he made and shipped an iPhone app almost entirely from Doom Emacs, a text-heavy editor beloved by power users. The article’s basic claim is simple: Apple quietly provides lots of behind-the-scenes command-line tools, and if you’re stubborn enough, you can stitch them together yourself and skip living inside Xcode.
But the real entertainment is in the crowd reaction. One commenter basically said, “welcome to the club,” admitting they fell into the same rabbit hole and wished they’d found this earlier. Another praised the setup as a near-complete replacement, saying it kept them in Doom Emacs 98% of the time even if Apple’s official tool still wins in a few areas. That gave the thread a strong DIY triumph vibe: part admiration, part "this is gloriously unhinged."
Then came the skepticism. One reader immediately swerved into a familiar complaint: if Emacs is so magical, why does its code-help system still freeze and lag for them in other languages? And the spiciest comment of all didn’t even debate the setup — it accused the article’s writing style of feeling AI-made, which is the modern internet equivalent of throwing a drink across the room. So yes, this was partly a story about building apps. But in the comments, it turned into a referendum on editor loyalty, software pain, and whether we can even recognize a human-written post anymore.
Key Points
- •The article describes a complete iOS development workflow in Doom Emacs, including writing Swift, building, simulator control, logging, LSP management, and project scaffolding.
- •The author implemented the workflow in a custom Doom Emacs module, `modules/ios.el`, of roughly 1,000 lines with custom `SPC i` keybindings.
- •Apple’s command-line tools—particularly xcodebuild, xcrun simctl, swift-format, and sourcekit-lsp—are presented as the foundation that makes editor-independent iOS development possible.
- •The setup also depends on xcode-build-server for LSP build metadata and xcodegen for generating Xcode project files from YAML.
- •The article positions the iOS module as part of a larger modular Doom Emacs configuration already used for Rust, Elixir, Kotlin/Android, web work, Org mode, and Magit.