When you type in a text editor, you always type out of some range. When your insertion point or cursor is blinking at the end of a word you just typed, you expect to still be “in touch” with the word, and that the next key you press will for example add a character to that word. This is a useful deception for us human users. It’s not actually part of the technological underpinnings.
Editing NSTableView cells with a double-click is the default behavior. I wrote about how to make the column header cells editable already. But in order to figure out how to end an active editing session when the user hits ⌘S to save the document, I grew more and more disappointed by the day.
When you work with view-based NSTableViews, cells by default contain a NSTextField. You can edit cell contents with them. The headers are not designed to be edited, though. You don’t have much control over the column headings from Interface Builder. So you have to build this yourself.
I struggled with my last article on the Zettelkasten portal because I didn’t know how to express a tiny piece of theoretical background in the right way. It was about a constructivist approach to cognition and information. Because it bugged me so much, I began to write this journal entry while editing the article. Maybe you’d like to have a look behind the scenes, so here it is.