tl;dr; Swap/check current Xcode version in use with x.
(Original blog post here)
Every year there's a period of time where you will have at least two or more release versions of Xcode installed (and possbile some pre-release versions). xcode-select is your friend in these situations, but syntax yada yada… made me make x.
For situations where you are working on apps with a lot of legacy support it not unusual to find developers with many previous Xcode versions sitting alongside the current release.
x is a simple script to help in those situations.
Simply copy it to your shell's path (probably where you keep your other executable scripts) then make it executable.
chmod +x x
You can confirm it's working by running it without any options, to see your currently selected version of Xcode, and the versions of xcode-select and the swift-driver:
$: x
Current Xcode (15.3) is at:
/Applications/Xcode.app
swift-driver version: 1.90.11.1 Apple Swift version 5.10 (swiftlang-5.10.0.13 clang-1500.3.9.4) Target: arm64-apple-macosx14.0
xcode-select version 2406.Then read the help file:
x Version 1.4.2
Usage: x [-p --current] [-d] [NN.N]
Options
-b
--beta Swaps to the currently installed beta of Xcode (typically called Xcode-beta.app)
-p
--current Prints the current Xcode path
-d
--default Set Xcode path to the current Xcode (i.e. /Applications/Xcode.app )
NN.N or AAAA
Where NN.N (or AAAA) is a value like 9.4, 10.0 or 11GM2 it will look for a version of Xcode with
a matching name and if it exists set the Xcode path to it. It will also look for hyphens '-' or
underscores '_' in the name like 'Xcode-beta' (Apples current beta naming convention) so you can.
simple type 'x beta' to swap to the current beta release.
-i
--install Uses xcode-select to open a dialog for installation of the command line developer tools
-s
--swift Equivalent to swift --version this help screen.
-x
--xcodeversion Equivalent to xcodebuild -version
-h
--help Shows this help screen.
-v
--version Shows the current version of this script.
-vv
--vversion Shows the verbose version of this script.
Examples:
$: x
Current Xcode (15.3) is at:
/Applications/Xcode.app
swift-driver version: 1.90.11.1 Apple Swift version 5.10 (swiftlang-5.10.0.13 clang-1500.3.9.4) Target: arm64-apple-macosx14.0
xcode-select version 2406.
$: x 9.4
Swapped to Xcode 9.4 at:
/Applications/Xcode 9.4.app
$: x -b
Swapped to Xcode 15.4 at:
/Applications/Xcode-beta.app
$: x -s
swift-driver version: 1.90.11.1 Apple Swift version 5.10 (swiftlang-5.10.0.13 clang-1500.3.9.4) Target: arm64-apple-macosx14.0
Current Xcode (15.3) is at:
/Applications/Xcode.app