I’m starting a personal project to familiarize myself with GUI components and string handling in the Cocoa framework. I figured it would be interesting to create a pair of simplistic ASCII editing objects from scratch, roughly analogous to NSText and NSTextView. This is a learning experience, not an exercise in pragmatism, so “just use NSTextView” doesn’t quite cut it. :)

I’ve written text editors before, and I’ve been a software developer for ten years, so I’m fairly familiar with the principals (OO, MVC, etc.), but not the specific practices in Cocoa and ObjC.

So, I’d like to get things started on the right foot by asking for your assistance finding relevant resources. In particular, I’m interested in existing source code (surely others have done this before me!), or links to discussions of the subject you may have encountered on the web – my attempts to Google up such things have fallen flat, most likely because I only have vague notions of what to search for!

Thanks! – PeatBakke

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You’ll need to familiarize yourself with the CocoaTextSystem - even if you don’t want NSTextView, you probably don’t want to discard all of it. Also look at NSResponder, NSEvent, NSView.

TextMate is the only Cocoa editor I know of that doesn’t use NSTextView, but its source code is not available.

Also, Cocoa’s native text string storage is in UniCode, not ASCII

BookCocoaProgramming has an entire chapter on the text system, with information on how to substitute your own classes for various parts.

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The O’Reilly Safari service is pretty good for this sort of thing. – PeatBakke