How to set the tint color of a UIView

Swift version: 5.1

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

The tintColor property of any UIView subclass lets you change the coloring effect applied to it. The exact effect depends on what control you're changing: for navigation bars and tab bars this means the text and icons on their buttons, for text views it means the selection cursor and highlighted text, for progress bars it's the track color, and so on.

tintColor can be set for any individual view to color just one view, for the whole view in your view controller to color all its subviews, or even for the whole window in your application so that all views and subviews are tinted at once.

To tint just the current view controller, use this code:

override func viewDidLoad() {
    view.tintColor = UIColor.red
}

If you want to tint all views in your app, put this in your AppDelegate.swift:

func application(_ application: UIApplication, didFinishLaunchingWithOptions launchOptions: [UIApplication.LaunchOptionsKey: Any]?) -> Bool {
    // Override point for customization after application launch.
    window?.tintColor = UIColor.red

    return true
}