How does one display a new view controller in the same Mac window?

Question

I\'m fairly new to Mac development and am slightly confused by the new \"storyboard\" feature in Xcode 6. What I\'m trying to do is segue from one view controller to another

Answer 1

(Reviving this as it comes up as first relevant result on Google and I had the same problem but decided against a custom segue)

While custom segues work (at least, the code given in foundry's answer worked under Swift 3; it needs updating for Swift 4), the sheer amount of work involved in writing a custom animator suggests to me that their main use case is custom animations.

The simple solution to changing the content of a window is to create an NSWindowController for your window, and to set its contentViewController to the desired viewController. This is particularly useful if you are following the typical pattern of storyboards and instantiate a new ViewController instance every time you switch.

However.

The NSStoryboard documentation says, quite clearly in macOS, containment (rather than transition) is the more common notion for storyboards which led me to look again at the available tools.

You could use a container view for this task, which adds a NWViewController layer instead of the NSWindowController outlined above. The solution I've gone with is to use an NSTabViewController. In the attributes inspector, set the style to 'unspecified', then select the TabView and set its style to 'tabless'.

To change tabs programatically, you set the selectedTabViewItemIndexof your TabViewController.

This solution reuses the same instance of the ViewControllers for the tab content, so that any data entered in text fields is preserved when the user switches to the other 'tab'.