How to change background color of NSSearchField (like in Messages app in OS X)

Question

I need to get this appearance of NSSearchField

But it seems to be impossible to set backgroundColor with standard methods of Interface Builder. How i can achieve this? Subclassing NSSearchField and NSSearchFieldCell didn't help, because i loose all animations (when you click on search field and icon+text sliding to left) when implementing my own draw methods.

Answer 1

What your screenshot shows is just the standard look of NSSearchField when being placed under an NSVisualEffectView. That is, the search field will automatically get the look above when it's a subview of NSVisualEffectView (with the material of NSVisualEffectMaterialLight).

However, if you want this appearance without NSVisualEffectView, you can manually set its appearance:

searchField.appearance = [NSAppearance appearanceNamed:NSAppearanceNameVibrantLight];