CODEWITHSUNDEEP
cocoa
Bret
Bret

Reputation: 912

Options for Cocoa-based text editor

I am working on a cocoa-based text editor. Should I base it on NSTextView or is there a more efficient option? Keep in mind that I plan to support tabs so there can be many editors open at the same time.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 560

Answers (2)

Peter Hosey
Peter Hosey

Reputation: 96323

I am working on a cocoa-based text editor. Should I base it on NSTextView

Yes.

or is there a more efficient option?

No, assuming “efficiency” includes your own time and effort weighed against the feature set you want to support—Cocoa's text system does a lot for you, which you'd be throwing away if you rolled your own.

Some examples:

  • Undo support
  • Advanced editing (emacs keys)
  • Support for input managers/input methods
  • Support for all of Unicode
  • Mouse selection
  • Keyboard selection
  • Multiple selection
  • Fonts
  • Colors
  • Images
  • Sounds
  • Find
  • Find and Replace
  • Spelling-checking
  • Grammar-checking
  • Text replacement
  • Accessibility

If you roll your own, you get to spend months reinventing and debugging some if not most if not all of those wheels. I call that inefficient.

The text system you already have, meanwhile, is fast nearly all of the time. You need huge texts with long lines (or maybe lots of embedded images/sounds) to bog it down.

Keep in mind that I plan to support tabs so there can be many editors open at the same time.

Unless the user is going to be typing into all of them at once, I don't see how that will cause a performance problem. 0% CPU × N or N-1 views = 0% CPU.

The one place where you might have a problem is memory usage, if the documents are both many and large. They'd have to be both in the extreme, as even a modest Mac nowadays has 1 GiB of RAM, and text doesn't weigh much.

If that's the case, then you could only keep the N most recently used unmodified texts in memory, and otherwise remember only the arrays of selection ranges. But 99% of the time, swapping texts in and out will be far more expensive than just leaving them all in memory.

Upvotes: 2

Dave DeLong
Dave DeLong

Reputation: 243146

NSTextView is probably the simplest way to go if you want to get a ton of nice features for free. It can't do everything, but it's an awesome start.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions