Migrating from UIKit to SwiftUI

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    September 18th 2019

Fully updated for Xcode 11 GM

If you’ve used UIKit before, many of the classes you know and love map pretty much directly to their SwiftUI equivalents just by dropping the UI prefix. That doesn’t mean they are the same thing underneath, just that they have the same or similar functionality.

Here’s a list to get you started, with UIKit class names followed by SwiftUI names:

• UITableView: List
• UICollectionView: No SwiftUI equivalent
• UILabel: Text
• UITextField: TextField
• UITextField with isSecureTextEntry set to true: SecureField
• UITextView: No SwiftUI equivalent
• UISwitch: Toggle
• UISlider: Slider
• UIButton: Button
• UINavigationController: NavigationView
• UIAlertController with style .alert: Alert
• UIAlertController with style .actionSheet: ActionSheet
• UIStackView with horizontal axis: HStack
• UIStackView with vertical axis: VStack
• UIImageView: Image
• UISegmentedControl: SegmentedControl
• UIStepper: Stepper
• UIDatePicker: DatePicker
• NSAttributedString: Incompatible with SwiftUI; use Text instead.

There are many other components that are exclusive to SwiftUI, such as a stack view that lets us build things by depth rather than horizontally or vertically.

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