How to add a toolbar above the keyboard using inputAccessoryView

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

If your user is likely to want common editing operations to appear while they are typing, you should set a custom view for your text fields’ inputAccessoryView property. For example, Tweetbot shows common Twitter symbols right above the keyboard, such as @ and #, so you can type them without having to adjust the iOS keyboard.

There are several ways you can do this, but the easiest is just to create a UIToolbar with any buttons you want. You can then call sizeToFit() on it so the toolbar fits all its buttons, then assign that to the inputAccessoryView property of any text fields and text views that should use it.

Here’s some code to get you started:

let bar = UIToolbar()
let reset = UIBarButtonItem(title: "Reset", style: .plain, target: self, action: #selector(resetTapped))
bar.items = [reset]
bar.sizeToFit()
textField.inputAccessoryView = bar

Available from iOS 3.2