Since Sequoia, NSSearchField in NSToolbar is not always getting focus when asked to.

Question

Created Oct ’24

Replies 1

Boosts 0

Participants 1

My app (Find Any File) behaves strangely on Sequoia: When the code calls the window's makeFirstResponder on the NSSearchField item in the window's toolbar, and if the toolbar is currently showing the small loupe icon, it should:

Switch to showing an NSTextView in place of the loupe icon
Make the text view the first responder so that the user can type in it.

This used to work reliably before macOS 15, but in 15.0.1 and also the current 15.1 beta it often misses step 1 or or step 2.

When it misses step 1, then the window's first responder reports back to it's set to the text field, but its frame is very narrow (width is 4 isntead of 192). And when it misses step 2, then the textview is visible but hasn't gained focus - instead, the main window is the first responder.

This happening is quite random. I find no pattern. Even worse, after calling makeFirstResponder, if I check the window's first responder, it's always the expected NSTextView, even if I delay the check with dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{ …. So I cannot even reliably detect when this goes wrong in order to act on it.

Has anyone else noticed this to happen in their apps?

Boost

Answer 1

Thomas Tempelmann OP

Oct ’24

Actually, the cause might be that, since I'm using a NSSearchToolbarItem on macOS 11 and later, I need to invoke its beginSearchInteraction method instead of making its searchItem the first responder. While doing the latter used to work, this has apparently become unreliable in macOS 15.

It's weird that it sometimes still works, though, making this tricky to notice and debug.

0