What does the NS prefix mean?

NateEag · 2026-09-29T16:03:12

NeXTSTEP. Grandparent is wrong.

Search this document for "Historical Note" for the canonical explanation:

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

rafram · 2026-09-29T16:03:20

That it's a symbol in a Cocoa framework :)

NS hasn't had anything to do with NeXTSTEP since, well, NeXTSTEP. The author's wording makes it sound like this is some crazy remnant of forgotten 30-year-old code poking through, but it's really not. It's Swift (most likely) string concatenation being passed a view instance instead of a string by mistake.

alanbernstein · 2026-09-29T16:35:08

What would you say the letters NS stand for? Perhaps "Not Standforanything"?

dpark · 2026-09-29T16:26:12

That’s kind of a weird take. It’s perfectly reasonable that Apple has not attempted to yank all the “NS” references out, but they are absolutely a holdover from NeXTSTEP. That NeXTSTEP no longer exists does not change that.

kergonath · 2026-09-29T16:49:27

The convention is a holdover. It does not mean that the code is the same. There’s plenty of NS classes that did not exist before OS X.

dpark · 2026-09-29T18:44:19

I didn’t say the code is the same. I said it’s incorrect to say that “ns” has nothing to do with NeXTSTEP.

the_lucifer · 2026-09-29T19:44:44

Even funnier, there's new ones added for Liquid Glass that still reference NS: NSGlassEffectView