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 th

Answer 1

Simply subclass UITextField and override caretRectForPosition

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

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Check out the property selectedTextRange of the protocol UITextInput, to which the class UITextField conforms. Few! That's a lesson in object-oriented programing right there.

Hide Caret

To hide the caret, nil out the text field's selected text range.

textField.selectedTextRange = nil; // hides caret

Unhide Caret

Here are two ways to unhide the caret.

1. Set the text field's selected text range to the end of the document.

   UITextPosition *end = textField.endOfDocument;
   textField.selectedTextRange = [textField textRangeFromPosition:end
                                                       toPosition:end];
   

2. To keep the caret in the same spot, first, store the text field's selected text range to an instance variable.

   _textFieldSelectedTextRange = textField.selectedTextRange;
   textField.selectedTextRange = nil; // hides caret
   

   Then, when you want to unhide the caret, simply set the text field's selected text range back to what it was originally:

   textField.selectedTextRange     = _textFieldSelectedTextRange;
   _textFieldLastSelectedTextRange = nil;
   

Answer 4

I simply subclass UITextField, and override layoutSubviews as follows:

- (void)layoutSubviews
{
    [super layoutSubviews];
    for (UIView *v in self.subviews)
    {
        if ([[[v class] description] rangeOfString:@"UITextSelectionView"].location != NSNotFound)
        {
            v.hidden = YES;
        }
    }
}

It's a dirty hack, and may fail in the future (at which point the cursor will be visible again - your app won't crash), but it works.

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

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.