Changing NSCursor for NSView above an NSTextView

Question

Found a similar question to mine(this), but my issues seems to be a bit more associated with view hierarchy.

I have a NSTextView, then as sibling views, several othe

Answer 1

A few important notes:

• Be careful calling super on your mouseMoved or similar events, or the cursor might just get reset by the base class implementation.
• Only reset your tracking area when the parent view size changes; if you try to do this by overriding layout() it's going to be happening all the time which is not great

Here's an example class that you can just use as a base class in your storyboards.

Swift 4 code:

import Cocoa

final class MouseTrackingTextView: NSTextView {

    // MARK: - Lifecycle

    override func awakeFromNib() {
        setupTrackingArea()
    }

    // MARK: - Resizing

    // Call this in your controller's `viewDidLayout`
    // so it only gets called when the view resizes
    func superviewResized() {
        resetTrackingArea()
    }

    // MARK: - Mouse Events

    override func resetCursorRects() {
        addCursorRect(bounds, cursor: cursorType)
    }

    override func mouseMoved(with event: NSEvent) {
        cursorType.set()
    }

    // MARK: - Private Properties

    private var currentTrackingArea: NSTrackingArea?

    private var cursorType: NSCursor {
        return isEditable ? .iBeam : .pointingHand
    }

    // MARK: - Private API

    private func setupTrackingArea() {
        let trackingArea = NSTrackingArea(rect: bounds,
                                          options: [.activeAlways, .mouseMoved],
                                          owner: self, userInfo: nil)
        currentTrackingArea = trackingArea
        addTrackingArea(trackingArea)
    }

    private func resetTrackingArea() {
        if let trackingArea = currentTrackingArea {
            removeTrackingArea(trackingArea)
        }
        setupTrackingArea()
    }

}

Answer 2

All you need is to subclass a custom view, override awakeFromNib method, add the custom tracking area for [.mouseMoved, .activeAlways] events: NSTrackingArea Info there. There is no need to override resetCursorRects and/or updateTrackingAreas. All you need is to override mouseMoved method and set the desired cursor there:

Note about discardCursorRects method:

From the docs

You need never invoke this method directly

Xcode 9 • Swift 4

import Cocoa

class CursorChangingView: NSView {

    override func awakeFromNib() {

        addTrackingArea(NSTrackingArea(rect: bounds, options: [.activeAlways, .mouseMoved], owner: self, userInfo: nil))

        wantsLayer = true
        layer?.backgroundColor = NSColor.cyan.cgColor
        layer?.borderColor = NSColor.black.cgColor
        layer?.borderWidth = 1
    }

    @objc override func mouseMoved(with theEvent: NSEvent) {
        NSCursor.pointingHand.set()
    }
}

Sample

Answer 3

Thanks @Leo Dabus for your answer, but I managed to solve it, so I will post my answer too.

In my case, for some reason, mouseEntered and mouseEntered did not work at all.

So here is my code that finally got it to work:

class CursorChangingView: NSView {
    let trackingArea: NSTrackingArea?
    func setupTracking() {
        if self.trackingArea == nil {
            self.trackingArea = NSTrackingArea(rect: self.bounds, options: NSTrackingAreaOptions.ActiveAlways | NSTrackingAreaOptions.MouseMoved | NSTrackingAreaOptions.CursorUpdate | NSTrackingAreaOptions.MouseEnteredAndExited | NSTrackingAreaOptions.ActiveInActiveApp, owner: self, userInfo: nil)
            self.addTrackingArea(self.trackingArea!)
        }
    }

    override func updateTrackingAreas() {
        self.trackingArea = NSTrackingArea(rect: self.bounds, options: NSTrackingAreaOptions.ActiveAlways | NSTrackingAreaOptions.CursorUpdate | NSTrackingAreaOptions.MouseEnteredAndExited | NSTrackingAreaOptions.ActiveInActiveApp, owner: self, userInfo: nil)
        self.addTrackingArea(self.trackingArea!)
    }

    override func resetCursorRects() {
        self.discardCursorRects()
        self.addCursorRect(self.bounds, cursor: NSCursor.arrowCursor())
    }

    override func mouseMoved(theEvent: NSEvent) {
        NSCursor.arrowCursor().set()
    }
}

It might be a little excessive, but worked, so will share this as my own solution.