Question

I’m using a view-based table view and don’t want it to draw NSTextFields with white text color when it is selected.
I was not able to find a working solution. So any help is very appreciated.

Here is my problem:

I want the “Selection is white” text also be drawn in the default text color.

So far I figured out that

• Setting attributes in tableView:viewForTableColumn:item: does not really help
• Setting NSTextField color to a custom color, which is something different than the control default color, will prevent from drawing in white but it still looses font style (bold, italic, etc).
• Setting NSTableView‘s selectionHighlightStyle attribute to NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyleNone does the trick but it will not redraw NSTableRowView. Also the select style is not what I want. I want the first click to select the row and the second click to edit the text field. When you use NSTableViewSelectionHighlightStyleNone your first click starts editing the text field.
• The text color does not change if the NSTextField is bordered. But I don’t want bordered text fields (As shown in the screenshot. The text fields are editable)

I couldn’t figure out ‘how’ the text field gets the white color. I have overridden setTextColor: and realized that it is never called when selection is changed. So I guess an NSAttributedString is built somewhere inside the NSTableView drawing/selecting routine.

Any help is very much appreciated.

Answer 1

I found the answer. I had to subclass NSTableCellView and override setBackgroundStyle:. That’s all!

- (void)setBackgroundStyle:(NSBackgroundStyle)backgroundStyle {
  [super setBackgroundStyle: NSBackgroundStyleLight];
}