Change UITextField and UITextView Cursor / Caret Color

I'm wondering about changing the color of the cursor / caret in a UITextField (And UITextView if its the same answer) in iOS. I've seen answers for OSX development, but nothing for iOS.

Is this even possible?

If you're targeting iOS 7+, this has been made much easier. Simply change the tintColor of the field with a cursor using the appearance proxy and it will apply throughout the app:

Swift 3.0:

UITextField.appearance().tintColor = .black 

Objective-C:

[[UITextField appearance] setTintColor:[UIColor blackColor]];

Same answer applies for an individual UITextField:

Swift 3.0:

myTextField.tintColor = .black 

Objective-C

[myTextField setTintColor:[UIColor blackColor]];

With iOS7 you can simply change tintColor of the textField

Swift 3:

  UITextField.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.black
  UITextView.appearance().tintColor = UIColor.black
 

yourTextField.tintColor = [UIColor whiteColor];

It works if you set it in code, 'cos somehow color trigger doesn't do it in the Interface Builder (Xcode 6.1.1). It suited well without a need to change any appearance proxy.

Note: This answer is out of date and should be used for pre-iOS 7 development only. See other answers for a 1 line solution using the appearance proxy in iOS 7.

I arrived at this question after I faced the same problem in a project I was working on.

I managed to create a solution that will be accepted by the AppStore review team as it does not use any existing Private APIs.

I have created a control called DGTextField that extends UITextField.

Setting tintColor for UITextField and UITextView works differently. While for UITextField you don't need to call additional code after updating tintColor to change cursor color, but for UITextView you need.

So after setting tintColor for UITextView (it doesn't matter in IB or in code) you need to call textView.tintColorDidChange() in order to apply it (actually it will pass text view's config down to its subviews hierarchy).

This worked for me in swift:

UITextField.tintColor = UIColor.blackColor()

You can also set this in storyboard: https://stackoverflow.com/a/18759577/3075340

A more general approach would be to set the UIView's appearance's tintColor.

UIColor *myColor = [UIColor purpleColor];
[[UIView appearance] setTintColor:myColor];

Makes sense if you're using many default UI elements.

Try, Its working for me.

[[self.textField valueForKey:@"textInputTraits"] setValue:[UIColor redColor] strong textforKey:@"insertionPointColor"];

It is only possible by accessing a private property and therefore may cause an Apple AppStore app rejection.

take a look at this Stackoverflow question

I think If you want some custom colors you can go to Assets.xcassets folder, right click and select New Color Set, once you created you color you set, give it a name to reuse it.

And you can use it just like this :

import UIKit 

class ViewController: UIViewController {
    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        UITextField.appearance().tintColor = UIColor(named: "YOUR-COLOR-NAME")  #here
    }
}

Tested on macOS 10.15 / iOS 13 / Swift 5

For people searching the equivalent in SwiftUI for Textfield this is accentColor:

TextField("Label", text: $self.textToBind).accentColor(Color.red)

Durgesh's approach does work.

I also used such KVC solutions many times. Despite it seems to be undocumented, but it works. Frankly, you don't use any private methods here - only Key-Value Coding which is legal.

P.S. Yesterday my new app appeared at AppStore without any problems with this approach. And it is not the first case when I use KVC in changing some read-only properties (like navigatonBar) or private ivars.

For Interface Builder version with Swift

@IBOutlet weak var tvValue: UITextView! {
        didSet {
            tvValue.tintColor = .black
        }
    }

If the UITextField is from UISearchBar then first get the textField from searchBar and then apply tintColor property:

let textFieldInsideSearchBar = searchBar.value(forKey: "searchField") as? UITextField
textFieldInsideSearchBar?.tintColor = UIColor.lightGray
    

Swift 4

In viewDidLoad() just call below code:

CODE SAMPLE

//txtVComplaint is a textView

txtVComplaint.tintColor = UIColor.white

txtVComplaint.tintColorDidChange()