Native all the way, until you need text
A seasoned macOS/iOS developer reflects on the challenges of implementing rich text and Markdown in native Apple frameworks, despite years of experience and deep platform knowledge. After extensive efforts using SwiftUI, AppKit, and TextKit 2, the developer found that none provided reliable, performant text handling for modern chat applications. Ultimately, web-based solutions like Electron delivered superior results, raising questions about the viability of native tooling for complex text interfaces.
- ▪The developer spent significant time trying to implement a Markdown-enabled chat in SwiftUI but encountered fundamental limitations in text selection and scrolling behavior.
- ▪Switching to NSTextView, AppKit, and even raw TextKit 2 failed to deliver stable performance or seamless integration with modern SwiftUI workflows.
- ▪WebKit provided a workable solution, but an Electron prototype outperformed all native attempts in text handling, rendering, and feature completeness.
- ▪The experience revealed that Apple’s native SDKs struggle with rich text use cases common in contemporary applications like chat and long-form content.
- ▪The developer concludes that for complex text interfaces, web-based frameworks are now more capable than Apple’s native tools, despite the expectation to use native technologies.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
I have been a native macOS / iOS developer for almost twenty years, and I want to say something about the usual “Oh, it is Node / Electron again… what a shame…” reaction. Recently, I tried to implement a simple chat with Markdown support in a pure Swift / SwiftUI app. And honestly, it is almost funny how immature all these “native” things still are when you step outside simple screens. Yes, you can achieve reasonable performance in SwiftUI. You can even convince yourself that jumpy scrolling is fine, and that a few lags here & there are acceptable. But then you want to select a whole Markdown document built from SwiftUI primitives, and you just cannot. By design. So, being smart & experienced, you move to NSTextView. It even supports TextKit 2 now. Great.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Hacker News (Front Page).
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