Placeholder in UITextView

Question

My application uses an UITextView. Now I want the UITextView to have a placeholder similar to the one you can set for an UITextField.<

Answer 1

I read through all of these, but came up with a very short, Swift 3, solution that has worked in all of my tests. It could stand a little more generality, but the process is simple. Here's the entire thing which I call "TextViewWithPlaceholder".

import UIKit

class TextViewWithPlaceholder: UITextView {

    public var placeholder: String?
    public var placeholderColor = UIColor.lightGray

    private var placeholderLabel: UILabel?

    // Set up notification listener when created from a XIB or storyboard.
    // You can also set up init() functions if you plan on creating
    // these programmatically.
    override func awakeFromNib() {
        super.awakeFromNib()

        NotificationCenter.default.addObserver(self,
                                           selector: #selector(TextViewWithPlaceholder.textDidChangeHandler(notification:)),
                                           name: .UITextViewTextDidChange,
                                           object: self)

        placeholderLabel = UILabel()
        placeholderLabel?.alpha = 0.85
        placeholderLabel?.textColor = placeholderColor
    }

    // By using layoutSubviews, you can size and position the placeholder
    // more accurately. I chose to hard-code the size of the placeholder
    // but you can combine this with other techniques shown in previous replies.
    override func layoutSubviews() {
        super.layoutSubviews()

        placeholderLabel?.textColor = placeholderColor
        placeholderLabel?.text = placeholder

        placeholderLabel?.frame = CGRect(x: 6, y: 4, width: self.bounds.size.width-16, height: 24)

        if text.isEmpty {
            addSubview(placeholderLabel!)
            bringSubview(toFront: placeholderLabel!)
        } else {
            placeholderLabel?.removeFromSuperview()
        }
    }

    // Whenever the text changes, just trigger a new layout pass.
    func textDidChangeHandler(notification: Notification) {
        layoutSubviews()
    }
}