LineNumbers

How to display line numbers alongside an NSTextView.

Every once in a while a question pops up on the Cocoa mailing lists about how to create a left margin with line numbers, such as in Xcode.

Approach 1: Custom NSRulerView

You can subclass NSRulerView and draw the numbers there. An example of that is the NoodleLineNumberView in NoodleKit along with the a more recently updated version: https://github.com/scottharwell/NoodleKit

Approach 2: Custom NSTextView

The trick is to subclass NSTextView with an NSTextContainer that allows for writing in a margin.

See http://home.earthlink.net/~kvddrift/software/linenumbers.tar.gz (link has been fixed)

This method ony works when NSTextView's setWidthTracksTextView attribute is set to YES. This is a severe limitation since this attribute will almost certainly be set to NO when implementing non-wrapping text; see DisablingWrapInTextView.

Approach 3: Custom NSScrollView Tiling

You can also do custom NSScrollView tiling, adding your own custom NSView subclass alongside the text view and doing whatever you want. No need to customize NSTextView or NSRulerView.

Old

I made a complete line numbering library. Have a look.

http://homepage.mac.com/mnishikata/page4/page9/page9.html (BROKEN LINK)

http://homepage.mac.com/mnishikata/page4/page9/files/page9_2.png (BROKEN LINK)