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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-03T06:47:58+00:00

Is it possible to select (Highlight) a range of text in TextEdit (by AppleScript,Cocoa

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Is it possible to select (Highlight) a range of text in TextEdit (by AppleScript,Cocoa or Carbon)?
I tryed this code but not work:

set value of attribute "AXSelectedTextRange" to {selStart, selLen}

It seems this attribute is readonly.
Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not sure how to do it with AppleScript (should be possible though), with the accessibility APIs, you could do something like this:

    AXUIElementRef systemWideElement = AXUIElementCreateSystemWide();
AXUIElementRef focussedElement = NULL;
AXError error = AXUIElementCopyAttributeValue(systemWideElement, kAXFocusedUIElementAttribute, (CFTypeRef *)&focussedElement);
CFRange range = CFRangeMake(0, 10);
AXUIElementSetAttributeValue(focussedElement, kAXSelectedTextRangeAttribute, AXValueCreate(kAXValueCFRangeType, &range));
CFRelease(focussedElement);
CFRelease(systemWideElement);

    That would select the first 10 characters if the TextEdit window is focussed.

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