I’m new to Cocoa. I’m currently designing an app that uses a subclassed NSTextField and an NSTableView to present a list of choices to the user and filter those choices. That all works fine. My only problem is that I want the arrow keys to arrow up and down the list of possible items in the table view and do a few other nice goodies, but I can’t seem to get notified of those key presses no matter what I do. I found:

http://www.cocoabuilder.com/archive/message/cocoa/2004/10/27/120330

It says to overload the NSResponder methods, but I’m not seeing anything in those either. I tried the following keyDown: to no avail as well:

• (void)keyDown:(NSEvent *)theEvent { NSLog([theEvent characters]); unichar unicodeChar; NSString *characters; characters = [theEvent characters]; unicodeChar = [characters characterAtIndex:0]; if (unicodeChar == 0x0009) { NSLog(@”Up”); } }

It never seems to get called.

I already use controlTextDidChange to filter the list, and it doesn’t give me anything for the arrow presses… What’s next? –Blarg

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See FieldEditor.

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I never updated this with my solution.

In the TextView’s delegate, you can implement

• (BOOL)control:(NSControl *)control textView:(NSTextView *)fieldEditor doCommandBySelector:(SEL)commandSelector

This gets the important key events we couldn’t pick up before and completely avoids dealing with key events.

Here’s a skeleton implementation.

• (BOOL)control:(NSControl *)control textView:(NSTextView *)fieldEditor doCommandBySelector:(SEL)commandSelector { BOOL returnValue = NO;

  //NSLog(@”TextField Action: %@”, [NSString stringWithCString:commandSelector]);

  if (commandSelector == @selector(insertNewline:)) { // Set returnValue to YES to have the text view ignore the command. returnValue = YES; } else if (commandSelector == @selector(moveDown:)) { } else if (commandSelector == @selector(deleteBackward:) || commandSelector == @selector(deleteForward:)) { }

  return returnValue; }

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Off the subject, but a safer way to turn a selector into an NSString is to use NSStringFromSelector.