Customizing the Cocoa Text System (2006) | Hacker News Reader

Customizing the Cocoa Text System (2006)

hcs.harvard.edu

103 pointslittlecosmic26 comments

I don't know what it is about it, but having came from Win32 and going to Cocoa (in 2008 or so), it just felt like an amazingly well engineered set of API's. Everything was so fancy and elegant, while Windows felt like hack on top of hack.

Imagine how it felt in the early 90s!

Unfortunately it still does, they had a nice thing going with WinRT, .NET Native and C++/CX, and they just messed it all up.

Now imagine the experience porting a NeXTSTEP app into MFC back in the the Windows 98 glory days.

If the state of current (10/11) Windows UI and UX is any indicator it must have gotten much worse since 2008. I would never have done anything that shows a GUI on Windows hadn't I had access to Qt to absolve me from that hell.

It's easy to forget that this little beast is all pervasive and can be customised so much. Every time I set up a new Mac, I feel happy it is here, but scared that one day it will just stop working. The perils of closed source, I guess.

For a while I was keenly interested in replacing the underlying text model with my own class, to support some weird stuff I wanted to do. It seemed like it would be straightforward, given the MVC structure, but the documentation confused me and I never quite figured it out. It didn't seem to be something Apple expected anyone to do.

For sure. The whole thing feels like a happy accident that fell out of how NextStep was built.

I was shocked and delighted to find that, after pairing a Bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone, the default emacs-lite Cocoa keybindings work there too. C-a to beginning of line, C-e to end, etc.

Am i just missing something or do the “command” shortcuts don’t work? Is there an option to enable?

Being able to quickly type text via a real keyboard is quite neat (except for C-Spc switching the input method, turns out I hit that quite a lot), but having to get back to the phone in order to cut/copy/paste is quite frustrating.

They do work, including copy, paste, cut, undo ... cmd-h to go to home screen ... theres a lot

Huh, you're right, it seems to be just some applications which behave oddly and break those shortcuts, I guess I'll have to take it up with them.

Sadly, Catalyst apps seem to use a different text system, which is not customizable.

Thanks for the heads up. My most used feature is a simple remapping of 'backwards delete word', which still seems to work.

Really? The built-in Stocks app is a Catalyst app AFAIK. My text system customizations still work in the search bar of the Stocks app.

Well that’s interesting. Maybe it’s changed? Messages was not using my customizations last I tried…

I would love to hear about the customizations my fellow HN readers use.

One of the first things I set up on a new Mac is option-f to move-word-forward and option-b to backward. This is so useful that I am doomed to typing ƒ on every other Mac I use temporarily

Do you also update your shell and emacs keybindings to match? Or do you use option as meta in emacs to start with, and forego all the native option chords?

Yes, although I don't spend much time in emacs anymore

Isn’t that supported by default using alt-left/right?

When I switch between mac and windows I'm always getting those confused (on windows the same is ctrl-left/right). Any advice?

When I was at uni I took Steve Yegge's Effective Emacs post to heart (https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs), now my most used tweak is:

"^w" = (deleteWordBackward:);

Any idea how to fix keyboard input switching, which doesn't respect each app's language? There is an option to keep each app's text input source, but it works only when an app has a text input field focused. It's my only serious issue with macOS for 17 years now.

I’m still annoyed by the fact that you cannot remap caps lock to backspace.

I did this via an OSS app https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/

Insert (2006) in title?

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