Hide the cursor of a UITextField

Question

Simply subclass UITextField and override caretRectForPosition

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

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

You can just clear the textfield's tintColor

self.textField.tintColor = [UIColor clearColor];

Swift 3.0

self.textField.tintColor = .clear

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/

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;