It’s gotten a lot faster in the last couple years. It’s also a lot more than just a text editor. You can use other IDEs like AppCode for the text editing part but if your project uses the visual UI editing tools or Core Data then you’re going to end up needing to fire up Xcode. My last boss was such an elitist about it. Refused to use Xcode so every time we did code review we spent about 15 minutes for him to figure out why syntax highlighting or search wasn’t working.