Duplicating Lines in Xcode

I’ve been working in TextMate for Rails development for the past year now. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of Mac OS X and iPhone development in Objective-C. Of course, this puts me into Xcode for the vast majority of my day.

The one keyboard shortcut I missed the most in Xcode from TextMate was ctrl-shift-D or “Duplicate Lines.” It turns out it’s insanely simple to add this to your Xcode environment.

  1. In Xcode, go to the Script menu (the stylized S to the left of Help) and select Edit User Scripts…
  2. Decide where you want to place your new command (I put it at the bottom of the Text menu). Click there. Then click the + menu (lower-left corner of the window) and select New Shell Script.
  3. Double-click where it says “Shell Script” to edit the name of your new command. Double-clicking to the right of the name allows you to assign a keystroke to the command. I used control-shift-D — same as TextMate.
  4. The menus should read as follows:
    • Input: Selection
    • Directory: Selection
    • Output: Insert after Selection
    • Errors: Ignore Errors
  5. Now click in the script area of the window and type in the following new line:
    cat <&0

Here’s how mine ended up looking:

That’s it! Close the window and enjoy.

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