Swift Extension Community Office Hour - November 17th 2025

[award999]

📢 We are hosting VS Code Swift Community Office Hours next week!

📆 When: Monday, November 17 at 10am PT | 1pm ET (On Webex)
👋 Who: @award999 @tracymiranda @matthewbastien @rbenegal will host, but the meeting is open to the whole community!
➡️ More details here

🗒️ Agenda:

• Introductions from the hosts
• Demos by @matthewbastien @rbenegal @fpseverino
• Discuss .tutorial syntax highlighting
• Open up to Q&A

Please comment on the discussion or on the forum post to add new topics to the agenda which we will keep up to date here. We will post meeting minutes here afterwards.

[tracymiranda]

We had 15 people join the inaugural Swift VS Code community meeting 🥳.

Intro and Demos

• @award999 kicked off the meeting and introduced some members of the team
• @matthewbastien demo’ed the new Swiftly integration for installing toolchains and snapshot toolchains directly inside VS Code. This builds on key work done by
• @fpseverino demo’ed the new GYB formatting support, as used in swift-crypto
• @rbenegal demonstrated the new walkthrough for onboarding folks new to the Swift extension
• @matthewbastien demo’ed docc integration

Q&A Session:

• Swiftly integration:
  • ❓Q: Does it work if I changed .swift-version by hand? Does it still prompt to reload the toolchain?
    • A: Yes, this will work, with some exceptions i.e.
      • if your .swift-version is in a home directory
      • if the .swift-version file contains, say main-snapshot, it will not detect in you install/update a different main-snapshot version.
  • ❓Q: Does Swiftly still require Xcode to be installed?
    • A: Swiftly will work on macOS without Xcode with some caveats. It must have the macOS CLT installed to get the things that it needs from the macOS SDK, such as certain core libs. Swiftly uses xcode-select --install command line tools and macsdk. XCTest will not work because it is only available from Xcode. However, swift-testing will work.
  • ❓Q: How do I point swiftly to use internal SDK (the SDK that comes with the macOS installation)?
    • A: There is currently no sdk support in Swiftly, though this may be possible by querying the sdks listed on swift.org
• GYB syntax highlighting:
  • ❓Q: Does the GYB highlighting rely on the LSP? Or is it pure regex-based?
    • A: GYB syntax highlighting uses TextMate grammar with regex. We cannot use LSP as GYB contains arbitrary python code.
• DocC Integration:
  • ❓Q: The docc preview constraint - requires executable to work - meaning any swift package (aka library) is OK, or does the package require having an executable target within it?
    • A: Any swift target will work, it will work for a library target
  • ❓Q: Is there a way to get docc blocks highlighted in vscode?
    • A: We can do this for some files such as .tutorial using TextMate Grammars. Doing so in markdown files is a little bit trickier since we don’t want to apply DocC blocks for all markdown files opened in VS Code.
• General Quesitons
  • ❓Q: Any tips to stop swift package manager to stop resolving packages in the background?
    • Try disable autoresolve. Background indexing can also be disabled but please beware that this may have negative impact on the editing experience.
  • ❓Q: How easy is it to add Expand Macro to the right click menu on a macro?
    • This shows up as a code action. Try Refactor → Expand Macro. To investigate what it would take to make this more obvious/discoverable.
  • ❓Q: How to deal with very annoying workflow where projects get rebuilt from scratch when switching between vscode and command line?
    • There is a workaround of having another build directory but this is far from ideal.
    • Lots of discussion, but in general would be nice to have:
      • ways to diagnose what is causing the rebuild e.g. vs code way to provide env information, swift build diagnostic mode that told users why something needed to be recompiled, or generate some sort of ‘manifest’ that can be compared between invocations
      • ways to make this work better e.g. a new swiftpm mode for ignoring environmental variables (GH #9384)
  • ❓Q: What do you folks recommend to do a clean build? swift:clean build folder runs a swift package clean. Is there a way to delete .build folder also as part of cleaning up?
    • A:Do a swift package clean and swift package reset. (You can also ‘rm -rf’ but usually not necessary)
  • ❓Q: Is there a way to delete a package cache
    • A: Not currently, something to investigate
  • ❓Q: In every Swift file, if you right-click, there is a a Swift → Clean Build Folder menu entry. Why is that? Doesn't feel quite right there?
    • A: Something to investigate, probably a quick fix!
  • ❓Q: Is there an easier alternative to TextMate yet for regex grammars?
    • A: Not really, the officially support way is with TextMate.

[plemarquand]

Q: In every Swift file, if you right-click, there is a a Swift → Clean Build Folder menu entry. Why is that? Doesn't feel quite right there?

It was indeed a quick fix! #1942

[SimplyDanny]

Q: In every Swift file, if you right-click, there is a a Swift → Clean Build Folder menu entry. Why is that? Doesn't feel quite right there?

It was indeed a quick fix! #1942

Awesome! The truth is, I sometimes even triggered the command from there. 😅 But it's surely not the right place to have it and it's good that it will get removed with your change.