Is there a way I can change individual text inside a TextView object? I want to make my own code/text editor. I want to implement syntax highlighting.
If there is any way you could show me an example of how, that would be great.
Thanks,
Sean
For syntax highlighting specifically, try this example by @omz. @JonB posted a more flexible approach a while back, but I can't find it
https://forum.omz-software.com/topic/2727/ui-textview-individual-words
Another option would be to use javascript/html for display with a backend in python. Here was an example I made a few years ago, which used the CodeMirror editor, which includes syntax highlighting fir a few dozen languages, with some backend work like opening and saving files done via the webview delegate methods in python.
Another option, which frankly I have not explored at all, would be to extend the objc OMTKSyntaxHighlighter. But this could be a little difficult to reverse engineer without creating some custom logging classes that record the inputs and output classes.
@Webmaster4o @JonB
Thanks so much for your help. I decided to start my own version of a Microsoft Word instead of just a Markdown editor. I have the font sizes working so far, and I am loving it.
The only problem I don't know how to fix currently: reading through the text field, while also scanning all of the individual character and font attributes. That way I can save the rich text to files, and then the states of the characters can be reloaded again.
If you read the docs for nsattributedstring, there are some methods to extract the underlying RTF data, which you can save in a file. Or, load a RTF file into a textfield...
Here is a simple proof of concept.
https://gist.github.com/b2436247405bb2ee81c1a52f5f2f3e83
actually, looks like you can actually read or write quite a few file formats, including word doc files directly... requires slightly different calls
@JonB sounds great. Thanks for the info. I'll get back to you on my progress; if I have any questions.