Important:
This text input management system described in this document is deprecated as of Mac OS X v10.6. Please see Input Method Kit Framework Reference, which describes the replacement technology for creating input methods, NSTextInputClient Protocol Reference, which describes the replacement technology for NSTextInput protocol, and NSTextInputContext Class Reference, which describes the replacement technology for NSInputManager class.
Important: This text input management system described in this document is deprecated as of Mac OS X v10.6. Please see Input Method Kit Framework Reference, which describes the replacement technology for creating input methods, NSTextInputClient Protocol Reference, which describes the replacement technology for NSTextInput protocol, and NSTextInputContext Class Reference, which describes the replacement technology for NSInputManager class.
The text input management system provides Cocoa applications with a wide variety of text input capabilities. This document describes the Cocoa classes related to text input management and explains how to use them.
Read this document if you want to create a custom input server for your Cocoa application or if you want to implement text input capabilities in a view.
The text input management system is described in the following articles:
“Text Input Management Architecture” provides an overview of the text input management system.
“About Key Bindings” explains how the text input management system binds keystrokes to character data.
Detailed information about creating and delivering a custom input server is covered in the following articles:
“Creating Input Servers” explains how to implement an input server.
“Deploying Input Servers” explains how to install an input server.
If you want to create a custom view to handle text input capabilities, read this article:
“Creating Custom Views” explains how to add keyboard input capabilities to a custom view.
For more information, refer to the following documents:
Text Editing Programming Guide for Cocoa describes the text-editing process, including text-input key event processing through the input management system.
NSInputServer, NSInputManager, and NSTextView are the primary classes that interact to provide text input management for Cocoa applications.
Last updated: 2009-06-02
