Building a Real-Time Pattern Detector with iOS 26’s TextEditor and AttributedString

An example I’ve built for IcySky

IcySky composer modal

TextEditor finally supports AttributedString with the iOS 26 SDK!

Inspired by the following WWDC25, I decided it was time to finally try it for my IcySky app!

Code-along: Cook up a rich text experience in SwiftUI with AttributedString - WWDC25 - Videos …

Apple also released a very cool sample here:

Building rich SwiftUI text experiences | Apple Developer Documentation

As it’s a social network app for BlueSky, it’s a perfect candidate, as I need to highlight text like mentions, hashtags, and URLs. Until now, we had to wrap a UITextView in a SwiftUI representable in order to do that. Well, not anymore!

Here’s the story of how I built automatic pattern detection that actually works, why you can’t just follow Apple’s documentation blindly, and how the new constraint-based formatting APIs are…