Hacker News Reader

It's a real shame that Apple doesn't release the source to a recent version of TextEdit. Given its structure (more or less just a stock objects from the API) it would be super educational for anyone who wants to use NSTextView et al.

View on HN

For the educational purpose of modern TextKit and NSTextView-like implementation, you can check out https://github.com/krzyzanowskim/STTextView that is modern re-implementation of the text view.

Yeah, you can get pretty close to TextEdit by just dropping an NSTextView into the document window XIB of a document-based Mac app, hooking up the data methods in your Document class to it, and doing a little bit of wiring of menu items to the textview. Text formatting bar, rulers, Find in Page, font panel, etc. There’s a few things missing but not a ton.

The document-based app template gets you a lot for “free” too, including tabs and conversion of windows into tabs and vice versa.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com