Re: Controlling selection in NSTextFields
Re: Controlling selection in NSTextFields
- Subject: Re: Controlling selection in NSTextFields
- From: Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2001 10:17:58 -0200
At 19:50 -0600 10/11/2001, Erik M. Buck wrote:
> Anyway, why is it called a "field editor" in some contexts and a
"text object" in others? Just to trip me up? :-)
Text objects are used for lots of things. The field editor is a text object
shared by (usually) all of the text fileds in a window and used to support
editing fields. All field editors are text objects but not all text objects
are field editors.
...
You are attempting something pretty complex. I highly recommend that you
read about field editors before continuing. There is lots of documentation
and well documented ways of using your own custom filed editor for a
particular control.
Good explanation. I just installed MTLibrarian and found the docs you
mention on the first try. I sure wish I had tried that out yesterday.
Looking back and now properly caffeinated, I conclude that I lost
interest in reading about the shared field editor as soon as I found
out it was shared... since I wanted to find out about a specific
field's contents, and not about editing properties shared by all of
them. (Probably thinking it was a similar situation to the shared
NSAppplication, NSFileManager and NSWorkSpace objects.) I hadn't
considered that only one field is edited at a time.
I have never tried what you are attempting. Have you considered using
multiple different text fields. Make some of them non-editable. The user
will only be able to place the cursor in the editable fields.
Probably getting the visual part right, and synchronizing the
contents, and jumping from one to the other as ths user is typing,
and handling selecting two or more fields simultaneously, will be
more complex than hacking the field editor...
I'm still miffed about the mouseUp thing, I think I'll file this as a
bug/enhancement request. Otherwise I'm confident that a custom field
editor will solve my problem.
Thanks again for your help!
--
Rainer Brockerhoff <email@hidden>
Belo Horizonte, Brazil
"Originality is the art of concealing your sources."
http://www.brockerhoff.net/ (updated Oct. 2001)