My attention was recently drawn to an issue I think I’ve seen only to a relatively innocuous degree, starting in 10.10.x OS X releases: the content of MarsEdit’s HTML text editor will shift sometimes such that the origin of the text view is not placed where you would expect it to be within the surrounding scroll view.

In every case I observe the problem as a result of resizing the document window and thus resizing the text editor view.

In some cases this has the effect of simply causing the text document to “scroll down” a bit, a change that can easily be corrected by scrolling the document back up. I call this the “Jumping Insets” variant of what I assume are related issues.

In other, more troubling cases the text view’s position moves leftward while its width also expands rightward, until it is either flush with or substantially off the screen. I call this the “Creeping Text View” variant.

These are not acceptable.

I’ve spent a few days scratching my head and running experiments about these issues, and while I’ve come to a number of conclusions, none of them is completely satisfying. I know less about the “jumping insets” variant, because as I’ve found it less troubling overall, I spent more time investigating “Creeping Text Views.” Here’s what I think I know about it:

1. The bugs only occur in the context of a Retina (@2x) screen resolution.
2. The problem manifests as the document view (text view) at first becoming just 0.5 points wider than the clip view, and then creeping ever wider as the disconnect presumably causes the clip view’s normal sizing behavior to break down.
3. The size discrepancy is introduced when a clip view is set to a non-integral width, and in response the NSLayoutManager associated with the text view proactively changes the frame of the text view to “more accurately” match the text.
4. I think the problem is new to 10.10.x. OS releases.

I put together a sample project (and pre-built executable), in case you’re curious to try it. I’m curious to know if anybody has advice for how I can work around the issues systematically and in a way that doesn’t compromise my ability to take advantage of dynamic layout too much. Thoughts that have occurred to me include trying to proactively avoid non-integral view widths (hard to guarantee on Retina), and interceding in a custom NSClipView to round-down instead of up when the document view’s frame is being set to a non-integral value.

I filed these bugs together because they seem related, and because the emphasis is on “Creeping Text Views.” Radar #20487339.