Hide Buttons in SwiftUI While Retaining Keyboard Shortcuts for MacOS

Learn how to effectively hide buttons in SwiftUI while keeping their keyboard shortcuts functional on MacOS. Discover essential code snippets and tips for achieving this seamlessly.
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This video is based on the question https://stackoverflow.com/q/70753723/ asked by the user 'mica' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/1165251/ ) and on the answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/70753818/ provided by the user 'Asperi' ( https://stackoverflow.com/u/12299030/ ) at 'Stack Overflow' website. Thanks to these great users and Stackexchange community for their contributions.

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Hiding Buttons in SwiftUI While Keeping Keyboard Shortcuts Functional on MacOS

SwiftUI is a powerful framework for building user interfaces on Apple platforms, but sometimes you want to make elements of your UI functional without cluttering it with visible buttons. One common scenario occurs on MacOS when you want to receive keyboard shortcuts without displaying the buttons themselves. In this guide, we will explore a solution to this issue.

The Problem

You may have experienced a situation where you require buttons that trigger specific actions via keyboard shortcuts, but you do not want these buttons visible in your SwiftUI view. Attempts to hide these buttons often result in losing the keyboard shortcut functionality, which can be frustrating.

Specifically, using .buttonStyle(PlainButtonStyle()) tends to deactivate keyboard shortcuts, rendering them ineffective. The challenge here is finding a way to hide the buttons while ensuring they retain their assigned keyboard shortcuts.

The Solution: Adjusting Opacity

The solution to this problem lies in a simple adjustment to the button's opacity. By modifying the opacity of the button group, we can effectively hide those buttons without losing their functionality.

Here’s How to Implement It

Adjust the Button Group: In your code, find the group of buttons you want to hide. Instead of utilizing PlainButtonStyle, you can set the opacity of the entire group to 0. This allows the buttons to remain functional while hiding them from view.

Sample Code Implementation:

The modified section of your code will look like this:

[[See Video to Reveal this Text or Code Snippet]]

With this change, the buttons will not be visible on the screen, but the keyboard shortcuts associated with them will still be active and functional!

Why This Works

Setting the opacity to 0 effectively makes the buttons invisible to users while keeping them in the view hierarchy. As a result, SwiftUI continues to process their keyboard events, allowing the shortcuts to function normally.

Conclusion

Hiding buttons in SwiftUI while retaining their keyboard shortcuts is a straightforward process when using the opacity property. By applying this solution, you can maintain a clean and uncluttered UI while ensuring that users can still interact with your application using their keyboards.

Feel free to experiment with this technique in your projects and see how it can improve the overall user experience. Happy coding!

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