How to draw your own NSTabView tabs?

Question

Hi,

I want to draw my own tabs for NSTabViewItems. My Tabs should look different and start in the top left corner and not centered.

How can I do this?

Answer 1

NSTabView isn't the most customizable class in Cocoa, but it is possible to subclass it and do your own drawing. You won't use much functionality from the superclass besides maintaining a collection of tab view items, and you'll end up implementing a number of NSView and NSResponder methods to get the drawing and event handling working correctly.

It might be best to look at one of the free or open source tab bar controls first, I've used PSMTabBarControl in the past, and it was much easier than implementing my own tab view subclass (which is what it was replacing).

Answer 2

I've recently done this for something I was working on.

I ended using a tabless tab view and then drawing the tabs myself in another view. I wanted my tabs to be part of a status bar at the bottom of the window.

You obviously need to support mouse clicks which is fairly easy, but you should make sure your keyboard support works too, and that's a little more tricky: you'll need to run timers to switch the tab after no keyboard access after half a second (have a look at the way OS X does it). Accessibility is another thing you should think about but you might find it just works—I haven't checked it in my code yet.