Hide the cursor of an UITextField

Question

I am using a UITextField with a UIPickerView for its inputView, so that when the user taps the text field, a picker is summoned for them to select an option from.

Nearly everything works, but I have one problem: the cursor still flashes in the text field when it is active, which is ugly and inappropriate, since the user is not expected to type into the field and is not presented with a keyboard. I know I could hackily solve this by setting editing to NO on the text field and tracking touches on it, or by replacing it with a custom-styled button, and summoning the picker via code. However, I want to use the UITextFieldDelegate methods for all the event handling on the text field and hacks such as replacing the text field with a button do not permit this approach.

How can I simply hide the cursor on the UITextField instead?

Answer 1

You can just clear the textfield's tintColor

self.textField.tintColor = [UIColor clearColor];

Swift 3.0

self.textField.tintColor = .clear

Answer 2

Answer provided by the OP, copied from the question body to help clean up the ever growing tail of unanswered questions.

I found another solution: subclass UIButton and override these methods

- (UIView *)inputView {
    return inputView_;
}

- (void)setInputView:(UIView *)anInputView {
    if (inputView_ != anInputView) {
        [inputView_ release];
        inputView_ = [anInputView retain];
    }
}

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder {
    return YES;
}

Now the button, as a UIResponder, have a similar behavior than UITextField and an implementation pretty straightforward.

Answer 3

You might also want to stop the user from selecting, copying or pasting any text so that the only text input comes from the picker view.

- (CGRect) caretRectForPosition:(UITextPosition*) position
{
    return CGRectZero;
}

- (NSArray *)selectionRectsForRange:(UITextRange *)range
{
    return nil;
}

- (BOOL)canPerformAction:(SEL)action withSender:(id)sender
{
    if (action == @selector(copy:) || action == @selector(selectAll:) || action == @selector(paste:))
    {
        returnNO;
    }

    return [super canPerformAction:action withSender:sender];
}

http://b2cloud.com.au/tutorial/disabling-the-caret-and-text-entry-in-uitextfields/

Answer 4

As of iOS 7 you can now just set the tintColor = [UIColor clearColor] on the textField and the caret will disappear.

Answer 5

If you want to hide cursor, you can easily use this! It worked for me..

[[textField valueForKey:@"textInputTraits"] setValue:[UIColor clearColor] forKey:@"insertionPointColor"]

Answer 6

Swift 3 version of Net's post

  override func caretRect(for position: UITextPosition) -> CGRect {
    return .zero
  }

  override func selectionRects(for range: UITextRange) -> [Any] {
    return []
  }

  override func canPerformAction(_ action: Selector, withSender sender: Any?) -> Bool {
    return false
  }