Cursor is not visible in empty custom EditText on KitKat

Question

I have created a custom EditText class that extends android.widget.EditText. When running the app on KitKat and previous OS versions, if the custom EditText is empty, the cursor does not appear. It will appear once text is entered.

I have tried multiple solutions posted on this site including adding android:textCursorDrawable="@null" and android:textIsSelectable="true" to the XML as well as adding those properties programmatically. None of these solutions has worked.

The custom EditText does have a background I am setting, but it needs to be there. Design constraints mean that I must set a non-default background.

So the question is, how do I make the cursor appear when the custom EditText is empty?

Here is the XML for the custom view:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<com.example.CustomEditText
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_alignParentEnd="true"
    android:background="@drawable/custom_edit_text_background"
    android:gravity="start"
    android:imeOptions="actionDone"
    android:inputType="textCapSentences|textMultiLine"
    android:maxLines="5"
    android:padding="@dimen/custom_padding"
    android:textAppearance="@style/TextAppearance.AppCompat.Medium"
    android:textColor="@color/custom_color"/>

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered May 20 '16 at 14:49

13

The solution I found is to set a minWidth on the custom EditText. A value of 40dp worked for me. Now the cursor will appear in the view, even when empty.

answered May 20 '16 at 14:49

MleChef

321
1
8

And the reason the width must not be 0 is because that doesn't leave any room to display the cursor. ...just discovered this. – Peri Hartman May 20 '18 at 04:08
Save my one hour, Thanks – sandip Aug 10 '22 at 13:02

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 13 '21 at 08:25

2

Just adding the solution that worked for me: I set the hint property on EditText. Cannot be empty though, so I used a whitespace.

In my case android:hint=" "

answered Apr 13 '21 at 08:25

Gandora

195
1
18

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

For starters, remove one item at a time from the XML.See if the cursor is being affected by anything else first (such as android:gravity="start" or android:textAppearance="@style/TextAppearance.AppCompat.Medium").

Then post your @drawable/custom_edit_text_background so we can see the XML. Finally, post your class CustomEditText. You may have inadvertently caused an issue in there.

These may help:

Custom editText on android
Custom EditText - Material Design
Edittext cursor is invisible in android 4.0
Attribute textCursorDrawable is available in API level 12 and higher
android:cursorVisible="true"
Set EditText cursor color

As stated in the question, I already tried the solutions you suggested. They did not work for me. Those XML attributes have no effect on the issue. — MleChef, May 18 '16 at 21:46

Cursor is not visible in empty custom EditText on KitKat

3 Answers3