I am wanting to change the text background color on a tableview's cell when it is hovered upon, similar to how AddressBook "highlights" the label of a contact's element when you mouseover the label names. However I cannot figure out how to accomplish... detecting a mouseover on a particular NSCell and... After detecting the cell his hovered upon, highlighting the text in that cell (not highlighting the entire row as if the user selected that row) As NSCell is not a subclass of NSView this seems to be a very difficult task. Any example of this or explanation on how this might be done would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!