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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-11T08:46:50+00:00

Some time iOS developer, first time Mac developer. I’m trying to add a Format

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Some time iOS developer, first time Mac developer. I’m trying to add a Format Bar to a Mac OS X app. Same as Pages. With buttons, below Toolbar, and the ability to show and hide.

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I started down the path of creating a custom view and adding it as a subview of the MainMenu.xib > Window > View, but I am not having luck.

I created an outlet to the view in the AppDelegate, but I’m not quite sure where to go from here. I can show and hide this view, but what happens with resizing all the views and contents below? In Pages it is quite a dynamic layout.

  • Should this view live in the MasterVC, instead of AppDelegate?
  • Is a CustomView even the right container for this? It seems quite different than iOS. I can’t even seem to set a background color on it.

enter image description here

I’d appreciate suggestions on how to proceed. I have to assume that this is a pretty common implementation. I’m probably missing something obvious that’s making it harder than it needs to be. Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It appears that there is an Apple control called inspectorBar. It can be enabled for an NSTextView in interface builder, or using:

    setUsesInspectorBar

    Unfortunately, it does seem to have quite a few limitations. As far as I can tell:

    • No way to show / hide with public API
    • No way to customize the buttons displayed
    • Only works with an NSTextView. No to NSTextField

    So while inspectorBar directly addressed my original broad question of displaying the formatting tools seen in Pages, I may still go with rdelmar’s suggestion.

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