Question

I wanted to use a custom background for my UITextFields. This works fine except for the fact that I have to use UITextBorderStyleNone to make it look pretty. This forces the text to stick to the left without any padding.

Can I set a padding manually so that it looks similar to UITextBorderStyleRoundedRect except for using my custom background image?

Answer 1

I found a neat little hack to set the left padding for this exact situation.

Basically, you set the leftView property of the UITextField to be an empty view of the size of the padding you want:

UIView *paddingView = [[UIView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0, 0, 5, 20)];
textField.leftView = paddingView;
textField.leftViewMode = UITextFieldViewModeAlways;

Worked like a charm for me!

In Swift 3/ Swift 4, it can be done by doing that

let paddingView: UIView = UIView(frame: CGRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 5, height: 20))
textField.leftView = paddingView
textField.leftViewMode = .always