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Creating a bordered button group

Jun 1, 2023 swiftui

The same way SwiftUI buttons can be given a .bordered button style to apply a nice, round border, you can use ControlGroup to group several buttons together in a bordered group. Let’s look at how.

As an example, consider this rich text control panel, where the bottom row has two buttons to affect the text indentation level, as well as a segmented picker to change text alignment:

Toolbar with indentation buttons

Both buttons use a .bordered button style, which makes them not as tall as the picker. I think it would be nice if the buttons and picker aligned better, and to group the two buttons together, since they affect the same text property.

To fix this, you can wrap the buttons in a ControlGroup to make them look like a segmented picker:

ControlGroup {
    Button("1") {}
    Button("2") {}
}

Since the control group is greedy, it will take up as much horizontal space as it can. If you don’t want this greedy behavior, you can just add a frame(width:) to the group.

We can now group the indentation buttons together in a group that aligns with the segmented picker:

Toolbar with a segmented indentation button group

If we want to take this even further, we can group the style buttons on the second row as well:

Toolbar with a segmented style toggle group

Although the rightmost stepper controls are a bit taller, I think that these groups much clearer indicate which buttons that belong together.

Discussion

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