Giving an NSTextView some padding/a margin

Question

How would I give a NSTextView some padding/a margin to the left? I know how you do it in a NSTextField (by subclassing NSTextFieldCell) but how do you do it in a NSTextView?

Answer 1

Create a mutable paragraph style (most probably by making a mutable copy of the default paragraph style, then set its head indent and first-line head indent to the left margin you want. Then, set this paragraph style as the value of the NSParagraphStyleAttributeName attribute for the entire contents of the view's text storage.

Note that this will show up in RTF and possibly HTML data obtained from/given to you by the view. If the view is not read-only (i.e., the user can edit the text and you will retrieve or receive that text from the view), then you should probably avoid this solution. If the user can show the ruler and edit the paragraph style themselves, then you should definitely avoid this solution.