Adding placeholder support to UITextView
This post shows how to apply the UITextField placeholder behavior to a UITextView, which natively lacks this support.
I basically solved this by adding two extension functions to UITextView:
extension UITextView {
func setupPlaceholder(text: String, textColor: UIColor) {
guard self.text.isEmpty else { return }
self.text = text
self.textColor = color
}
func setupPlaceholderBeforeEditing(
textColor: UIColor,
placeholderColor: UIColor) {
guard self.textColor == placeholderColor else { return }
self.text = ""
self.textColor = textColor
}
}
The placeholder text and color is customizable. I add app-specific extensions that call the functions with app-specific colors, so I don’t have to pass around colors.
When I create a text view, I run setupPlaceholder(...) to set up a standard placeholder. This operation will abort if the view already has text content.
When editing begins, I call setupPlaceholderBeforeEditing(...) to ensure the placeholder text is correctly removed.
To determine if a view currently displays a placeholder, we compare text and placeholder colors. However, this requires that we use different text colors for text and placeholder text.
When editing ends, I call setupPlaceholder(...) once again to re-apply the placeholder, if the user hasn’t entered any text.