TextKit Overview
TextKit goes back to the NeXT era, before Mac OS X was a thing. After the relatively new Cocoa frameworks for Mac app programming were introduced and introduced the “Cocoa Text System” title, iOS and UIKit stuck with “TextKit”, and in 2021 TextKit 2 returned.
This revolves around everything related to accepting textual user input on the Mac:
NSTextView
for the UI component,NSTextStorage
for the processing of text and style changes,NSLayoutManager
for the computation of line and glyph sizes, and for applying styles,NSTypesetter
for putting glyphs on the screen.
Even NSTextField
s are just reusing a shared NSTextView
, called the window’s field editor. It’s everywhere.
- TextKit API docs: describes all core components and, since TextKit 2, comes with sample projects and WWDC links.
- TextKit 2 Introduction (WWDC 2021)