Disable Magnifying Glass in UITextField

Question

Is there a way to prevent the user from moving the cursor in a UITextField? I'd like it to stay at the end of the string.

Answer 1

There's no way to prevent them from moving the cursor. You can, however, prevent them from editing the text except at the end by implementing the

– textField:shouldChangeCharactersInRange:replacementString:

method in your text field's delegate.

Edit: you can also set userInteractionEnabled to NO so that the user can't tap the field. Call becomeFirstResponder manually so that the field gets focus since the user can't tap to focus.

Answer 2

This is an old question, but I was looking for an answer to the same question, and found a solution.

It is actually quite simple to prevent the user from moving the cursor. Just subclass UITextField and provide the following implementation of caretRectForPosition:

- (CGRect)caretRectForPosition:(UITextPosition *)position
{
    return [super caretRectForPosition:self.endOfDocument];
}

Answer 3

NO SUBCLASS needed.

You Could use UITextFieldDelegate. It will make disable magnifying glass & text selection.

- (BOOL)textFieldShouldBeginEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
    textField.userInteractionEnabled = NO;
    return YES;
}

- (void)textFieldDidEndEditing:(UITextField *)textField {
    textField.userInteractionEnabled = YES;
}

NB: This is just a bypass.

Answer 4

I'd suggest to check the gestureRecognizers property.

You will find a lot of them in the array and might want to either remove them all or to find the ones that triggers the event you want to intercept and remove/replace it.

I used it to remove copy/paste and magnifying glass functionalities from an UITextField

Answer 5

I haven't check if you can disable the magnifying glass, but the recommended way to selectively disable editing behavior in a UIResponder (and thus a UITextField) is to implement canPerformAction:withSender of UIResponder.

See UIResponder documentation.

Maybe if you return "NO" for the select and selectAll action you can disable it.

Another, more brutal, way is to intercept any touch event and reset the cursor to the end.