How to customize cursor in NSSearchField?

Question

This seems it should be easy enough, but could anyone give me pointers on how to do this? Seems I should be subclassing NSTextView and using drawInsertionPointInRect:color:turnedOn: but how would I do this? I don't really want to do major customization maybe just a touch thicker or a touch shorter, but the question is where?

Thanks,

rc

Answer 1

This isn't really straight forward, since a NSSearchField is a subclass of NSTextField and not NSTextView. However, each NSTextField uses a proxy NSTextView to do the drawing, and this proxy NSTextView (called the field editor), is maintained by the current window. So, what you want to do is to create your custom NSTextView subclass, instantiate it somewhere in your window controller (or whatever you use as your windows delegate) and then create the following method: windowWillReturnFieldEditor:toObject:.

In the method you check if the toObject is your search field (or just any search field, in case you want to override it for every search field in the window), and then return your custom NSTextView, otherwise return nilfor the default field editor with the default behaviour.