The Cocoa Text System

Another bit of follow-up from yesterday’s piece on Catalyst apps and standard keyboard shortcuts. The Cocoa text editing system — which dates back to NeXTStep with a slew of standard shortcuts that date back to classic Mac OS (and Emacs!) — is incredibly rich and deep. UIKit follows much of it, but not all. (For example, on the Mac, Cocoa supports custom keybindings — a very powerful feature that lets you customize text editing shortcuts and have them work almost everywhere.)

This 2006 document by Jacob Rus remains an essential resource for anyone who wants to dig in. The good news about Catalyst: Catalyst apps just inherit these features and shortcuts automatically on the Mac. System-wide Services “just work” too, even though iOS doesn’t have them.

★ Friday, 20 December 2019