Xcode 26 XIB ignores difference between NSView frame and alignment rectangles

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Created 6d

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In the last three betas of Xcode 26, opening XIB files that rely on the older struts-and-springs setup (rather than Auto Layout) has exposed a new problem: Xcode 26 ignore the difference between a view’s frame and alignment rectangle.

If you had arranged views using their frame rectangle (the default for the old method) this causes two problems:

All UI widgets are both larger and no longer aligned.
Switching between frame and alignment rectangles while configuring any NSView (through the inspector setting) has no effect.

Is anyone else seeing this? It’s one thing to convert a few smaller views to Auto-layout (its reliance on alignment rectangles makes it immune to the "death" of frame rectangle-based layout) it is a rather different task to re-layout thousands of UI widgets as a result of this one bug.

Filed as FB18835363

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FxFactory OP

5d

This looks like a bug in AppKit... even if you manually re-adjust all your UI, this will only fix the appearance on macOS 26. On prior versions of macOS, many UI widgets will look smaller than they should be, all as a side effect of AppKit no longer interpreting frame rectangle vs alignment rectangle.

Unclear if the fix would be to have the XIB compiler actually spit out the correct rectangles so as to maintain visual consistency with all versions of macOS.

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