Question

NSSearchField allows you to uncheck “search immediately” in the Interace Builder attributes editor. When this is the case, the target action will not be invoked until a short time after the user stops typing.

1. Exactly how long is this delay?
2. Is this delay configurable? If so how?

Answer 1

I don’t believe the delay is configurable. What you could do is set the text field to search immediately but then override -textDidChange: in a subclass of NSSearchFieldCell.

You could then control the search delay using an NSTimer or some other method and call super’s implementation of -textDidChange: when you want to trigger the search.