I made a view that displays a zoomed out view of a string from a text view, with indentation, along with a rectangle showing where the text view is in the file.

You can click around in the view to move the It also highlights the selection, and draws lines in blue if they contain the string in the NSFindPBoard, so you can see all the lines in the file that match when you use the Find panel.

This is available under a Creative Commons license, and I’d ask that if you make any improvements, you send them back to me or join the ‘leverage’ sourceforge project, where the code is hosted. I wanted to eventually make this into a Cocoa text plugin like my I-Search plugin.

Here is the SVN repository for the textshape code.

There was also a Source code Tarball with a demo app, shown in the screenshot below:

The most recent source that I know of is on leverage.sf.net which is a repository for text-system hacks I used to work on. If anyone wants to pick it up and modernize it, I’d be grateful.

In particular, you want the ‘isim’ directory. The other directories are unrelated, but if you find them interesting, I’d love to hear from you.

If you just want to download the last working universal binary build (from 2007), it is here: IncrementalSearchInputManager-universal.zip. Let me know how it works?