How do you duplicate a file in XCode?

Question

Anyone know a good solution?

So far I have not found a better way than using File>New file and then copying contents from old file to new.

You can probably duplicate in Finder and re-import but that's almost same amount of work: switching to finder, duplicate, import new files.

Doing this with one class is not so hard, but what to do if you need to generate 10+ similar Classes based on superclass.

In Eclipse you select file and then copy/paste it in same folder. In finder there's Duplicate.

There's a menu Edit > Duplicate. But it's ALWAYS disabled. I tried selecting various files, classes, methods. It's still disabled.

Solution 1

"Duplicate" is enabled for targets in XCode (pretty much nothing else that I know of).

If you have a substantial number of subclasses with the same starting point to replicate, why not make a class template from it? Then you can just use file->New to make new instances. It's fairly quick to do.

This is probably the simplest example:

http://www.macresearch.org/custom_xcode_templates

Otherwise, I'd simply duplicate the files in Finder as many times as you need, name them, and drag them into XCode en-masse.

Solution 2

In XCode 4.2 (I know this is an old question) there is Duplicate under the File menu.

Select the file (you can select multiple files but it doesn't appear to do anything useful) in the Project Navigator and then File->Duplicate. Hooray!

Solution 3

In Xcode 4.5 we can duplicate using File-> Duplicate or cmd + shift + S

Solution 4

Careful! When you use duplicate ( CMD + Shift + S ) - Xcode have a problem with indexing headers. Also when u want to make a refactoring it can be next error window:

So there a couple of ways what to do, to fix that.

1. Delete derived data from menu Window > Projects. Restart Xcode.
2. Product > Clean

Solution 5

I use the following perl script to duplicate a file pair in the Terminal. You give it the base name of the original and new file, and it copies the header and implementation (c/cpp/m/mm) file, then replaces all occurances of the base name with the new name, then adds them to subversion. You still have to add the new files in to Xcode and adjust the creation date in the comment (I've got a Keyboard Maestro macro for that), but its quicker than doing a lot of the steps manually. I operate with a Terminal window and four tabs pre-set to the Project, Source, Resources, and English.lproj directory which gives quick access for a lot of operations.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use lib "$ENV{HOME}/perl";
use warnings;
use strict;

our $cp = '/bin/cp';
our $svn = '/usr/bin/svn';
our $perl = '/usr/bin/perl';

our $source = shift;
our $add = 1;
if ( $source =~ m!^-! ) {
    if ( $source eq '-a' || $source eq '--add' ) {
        $add = 1;
        $source = shift;
    } elsif ( $source eq '-A' || $source eq '--noadd' ) {
        $add = undef;
        $source = shift;
    } else {
        die "Bad arg $source";
    }
}
our $dest = shift;

die "Bad source $source" unless $source =~ m!^(.*/)?[A-Za-z0-9]+$!;
die "Bad dest $dest" unless $dest =~ m!^(.*/)?[A-Za-z0-9]+$!;
my $cpp;
$cpp = 'c' if ( -e "$source.c" );
$cpp = 'cpp' if ( -e "$source.cpp" );
$cpp = 'mm' if ( -e "$source.mm" );
$cpp = 'm' if ( -e "$source.m" );
die "Missing source $source" unless -e "$source.h" && -e "$source.$cpp";
die "Existing dest $dest" if -e "$dest.h" && -e "$dest.$cpp";

our $sourcename = $source; $sourcename =~ s!.*/!!;
our $destname = $dest; $destname =~ s!.*/!!;

print "cp $source.h $dest.h\n";
system( $cp, "$source.h", "$dest.h" );
print "s/$sourcename/$destname in $dest.h\n";
system( $perl, '-p', '-i', '-e', "s/$sourcename/$destname/g", "$dest.h" );

print "cp $source.$cpp $dest.$cpp\n";
system( $cp, "$source.$cpp", "$dest.$cpp" );
print "s/$sourcename/$destname in $dest.$cpp\n";
system( $perl, '-p', '-i', '-e', "s/$sourcename/$destname/g", "$dest.$cpp" );

if ( $add ) {
    print "svn add $dest.$cpp $dest.h\n";
    system( $svn, 'add', "$dest.$cpp", "$dest.h" );
}

View more solutions

Comments

[Chuck]

If the classes are so similar, it seems like the commonalities should be extracted into a superclass so that the subclasses contain only the unique behavior.

[Rob Osborne]

This is a silly comment. The commonalities are the include files for the superclass, naming convention (In my case I have RemoteSystem, RemoteFolder, etc. inheriting from RemoteObject), init functions with the proper [super init...]. You know, the things a subclass needs to define.

[Arcadian]

Yeah. That was a silly comment. I need to be able to duplicate a file too.

[Steve Moser]

Watch out if you use source control. For some reason after duplicating the files they were not added to my source control.

[Alex Zavatone]

It's not under the File menu in Xcode 4.2. It's under the Edit menu and it is always disabled when a file is selected.

[WiseOldDuck]

@Alex there is, confusingly enough, Duplicate on both the File and Edit menus, doing different things. File --> Duplicate is the one you want, to duplicate a file, as asked about in the original post. It's right after Save.

[WiseOldDuck]

@Alex Well I'm on 4.3 now so can't easily verify but was using 4.2.x when I posted this - are you on the latest point version of 4.2? I'd love to figure out exactly when this was added and I'll update my answer.

[Alex Zavatone]

Yeah, I'm on 4.2.1. Posted Date: October 12, 2011, Build: 4C199. Some guys from the Xcode team mentioned that there would be no more updates for Xcode on Lion, but since I hate Lion with the burning passion of a thousand suns, I'm only going to move there when there are no other options.

[Constantino Tsarouhas]

Wow! I never noticed File → Duplicate…! :-p

[Paul Slocum]

In XCode 5.1 when I duplicate files to create a new class, there's a bug that sometimes prevents the duplicated .m file from actually building. The linker was saying the class was missing even though I cleaned and it clearly should have been building. If instead I use File->New and create a new class and manually copy the text contents of the non-building duplicated file, then it all works fine.

[Peter N Lewis]

Unless there is something new in Xcode 8, Duplicate does not adjust the #imports and class names like my script does.

[Anton Tropashko]

targets for the new copy ain't right. Which is a problem if the file being duplicated is in two dozen targets.

[Anton Tropashko]

what about xib duplication?

[SinisterMJ]

@AntonTropashko That is a good point, this is a pretty old answer - although Xcode may not let you duplicate some things, you can use Finder to duplicate something like a xib file, then drag it bak into the project after changing the name and re-work.

[Anton Tropashko]

yeah, that is obvious, except xib is a member of about 30 targets. you see my problem?

[Erhannis]

Be careful how you do this - I had some slight variation in my steps, and several dozen commits later realized the files were OUTSIDE my project folder, referenced with relative paths, and not actually committed to my repo. It was a disturbing discovery.