How To Customize UITextView

Using Swift to custome style UITextView in an iOS app

My new iOS app, “Mock My Words”

So recently I’ve been working on an iOS version of my Mock My Words app. It’s pretty simple in functionality so I wanted to compensate with a nice user interface. The main functionality requires that a user enter (or paste) in text of pretty much any size. Oftentimes iOS text entry with a UITextField, but that only offers single line input. For multi-line input, you have to use UITextView 😔. After throwing that in my app I was rather unimpressed with how it looked. So, I decided to put my own spin on it. It took a bit of research and I’m pleased with how it turned out so I thought I’d share with the community on how customize the UITextView object to your own needs.

Create the UITextView

I’m building this app programmatically, so the first step is to instantiate the UITextView object. If you’re using a storyboard, you’ll want to create an IBOutlet and then follow the other steps the same. I declared my UITextView at the class level of the view controller it’s used in, and the one-line looks like

let textBox = UITextView()

Please note, all of the following code should be executed by viewdidload(), but feel free to extract it to a function and then call that function from viewDidLoad()