NSTabView with background color

Question

As discussed elsewhere, NSTabView does not have a setBackgroundColor method and subclassing NSTabView and using an drawRect to control it does no longer work - as it does no

Answer 1

PSMTabBarControl is probably the best workaround for you. I have created several custom tab views, but cocoa does not play well with this control. PSMTabBarControl has been updated to support Xcode 4. https://github.com/ciaran/psmtabbarcontrol

Answer 2

Have you tried setting the background color of its underlying CALayer? (Make it a layer-backed view, if it isn't already, by setting wantsLayer = YES.)

Answer 3

If your situation can tolerate some fragility, a very simple and quick approach is to subclass NSTabView and manually adjust the frame of the item subviews. This gives each item a seamless yellow background:

- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect {
    static const NSRect offsetRect = (NSRect) { -2, -16, 4, 18 };

    NSRect rect = self.contentRect;

    rect.origin.x += offsetRect.origin.x;
    rect.origin.y += offsetRect.origin.y;
    rect.size.width += offsetRect.size.width;
    rect.size.height += offsetRect.size.height;

    [[NSColor yellowColor] set];
    NSRectFill(rect);

    [super drawRect:dirtyRect];
}

A future change in the metrics of NSTabView would obviously be a problem so proceed at your own risk!