NSTextView: format text programmatically

Question

How can I format parts of a text in a NSTextView programmatically? For example, make all occurrences of the word "foo" blue or make all the text grey but the current paragraph (where the cursor is) solid black? Thanks

Answer 1

You can use NSAttributedString or NSMutableAttributedString just specify text format (color, text size, etc) and pass it to your NSTextView, for example:

    NSString *str = @"test string";
    NSMutableAttributedString *attrString = [[NSMutableAttributedString alloc] initWithString: str];
    NSDictionary *attributes = @{
                                 NSForegroundColorAttributeName : [NSColor redColor],
                                 NSFontAttributeName : [NSFont fontWithName:@"HelveticaNeue-Bold" size:12.0]
                                 };
    [attrString setAttributes:attributes range:NSMakeRange(0, str.length)];

    [[self.myNSTextView textStorage] appendAttributedString: attrString];

That will set up all your text to be the same but just replace range attribute with the one you want to change only this part of the text: NSMakeRange(0, 2) this will add just the text attributes to first two lerrers.