Proper way to replace NSTextStorage in NSTextView?

Question

I am making some text viewer app. Currently I need very frequent and precise line handling ability, so I want to subclass NSTextStorage class. But I couldn't find any method to set a new text storage to NSTextView. The only method I could find was

-[NSLayoutManager replaceTextStorage:]

method. But it's confusing whether this is what I was looking for. Because it seems just replace text storage of linked NSLayoutManagers instead of NSTextView.

I also considered subclassing NSTextView and overriding -textStorage method, but if the class is not designed for subclassing, it will make undefined result.

Anyone has tried to use custom NSTextStorage on NSTextView? How can I do this? Or is this prohibited by design?

Answer 1

You can do something like this to change the storage for an NSTextView:

NSTextStorage *newStorage = [[NSTextStorage alloc] initWithString: @"test"];

[aTextView.layoutManager replaceTextStorage: newStorage];

Since NSTextStorage is a subclass of NSMutableAttributedString you can manipulate it with all of the same methods.