Change UITextField and UITextView Cursor / Caret Color

Question

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Note: This answer is out of date and should be used for pre-iOS 7 development only.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).