Changing Placeholder Text Color with Swift

Question

I have a design that implements a dark blue UITextField, as the placeholder text is by default a dark grey colour I can barely make out what the place holder te

Answer 1

In my case, I had to make the placeholder into black color. The name of my UITextField is passwordText. Below code is tested in Swift 5 and is working fine for me. I also had an existing text for the corresponding placeholder.

let placeholderColor = UIColor.black
passwordText.attributedPlaceholder = NSAttributedString(string: passwordText.placeholder!, attributes: [NSAttributedString.Key.foregroundColor : placeholderColor])

Answer 2

For Swift 3 and 3.1 this works perfectly fine:

passField.attributedPlaceholder = NSAttributedString(string: "password", attributes: [NSForegroundColorAttributeName: UIColor.white])

Answer 3

You can accomplish this quickly, without adding a line of code, using Interface Builder.

Select the UITextField and open the identity inspector on the right:

Click on the plus button and add a new runtime attribute:

placeholderLabel.textColor (Swift 4)

_placeholderLabel.textColor (Swift 3 or less)

Use Color as type and select the color.

That's it.

You wont see the result until you run your app again.

Answer 4

To set the placeholder color once for all the UITextField in your app you can do:

UILabel.appearanceWhenContainedInInstancesOfClasses([UITextField.self]).textColor = UIColor.redColor()

This will set the desired color for all TextField placeholders in the entire app. But it is only available since iOS 9.

There is no appearenceWhenContainedIn....() method before iOS 9 in swift but you can use one of the solutions provided here appearanceWhenContainedIn in Swift

Answer 5

It is more about personalize your textField but anyways I'll share this code got from another page and made it a little better:

import UIKit
extension UITextField {
func setBottomLine(borderColor: UIColor, fontColor: UIColor, placeHolderColor:UIColor, placeHolder: String) {
    self.borderStyle = UITextBorderStyle.none
    self.backgroundColor = UIColor.clear
    let borderLine = UIView()
    let height = 1.0
    borderLine.frame = CGRect(x: 0, y: Double(self.frame.height) - height, width: Double(self.frame.width), height: height)
    self.textColor = fontColor
    borderLine.backgroundColor = borderColor
    self.addSubview(borderLine)
    self.attributedPlaceholder = NSAttributedString(
        string: placeHolder,
        attributes: [NSAttributedStringKey.foregroundColor: placeHolderColor]
    )
  }
}

And you can use it like this:

self.textField.setBottomLine(borderColor: lineColor, fontColor: fontColor, placeHolderColor: placeHolderColor, placeHolder: placeHolder)

Knowing that you have an UITextField connected to a ViewController.

Source: http://codepany.com/blog/swift-3-custom-uitextfield-with-single-line-input/

Answer 6

This code is working in Swift3:

yourTextFieldName .setValue(UIColor.init(colorLiteralRed: 80/255, green: 80/255, blue: 80/255, alpha: 1.0), forKeyPath: "_placeholderLabel.textColor")

let me know if you have any issue.