Nerdy internals of an Apple text editor

To understand how text editing works in native Apple text editors, we first need to discuss the centerpiece of the whole system, the TextView class. Technically, NSTextView and UITextView have their differences, but the API is similar enough that we can treat them as a single TextView class. I will highlight the differences where necessary.

TextView is a massive component that only grows in complexity with each release of respective operating systems. The TextEdit app consists almost entirely of a single TextView. When a single class can be used to build an entire app, you know it’s a beast.

→ papereditor.app/internals

A lovely deep dive in TextView and related API's. Very well written, accompanied with good images/videos to explain something, absolutely worth the read.

Especially if you want to know more about NSTextView, NSTextStorage, NSTextContainer, NSLayoutManager, NSScrollView, NSAttributedString, and much more.

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