How to make a TextField or TextEditor have default focus

Paul Hudson @twostraws December 1st 2022

Updated for Xcode 14.2

SwiftUI on macOS provides a defaultFocus() modifier that lets us activate one view as the first responder to user input as soon as a view is shown. Sadly it doesn’t exist on iOS, but we can work around that using onAppear().

First, here’s the code with the workaround in place, suitable for use on iOS:

struct ContentView: View {
    enum FocusedField {
        case firstName, lastName
    }

    @State private var firstName = ""
    @State private var lastName = ""
    @FocusState private var focusedField: FocusedField?

    var body: some View {
        Form {
            TextField("First name", text: $firstName)
                .focused($focusedField, equals: .firstName)

            TextField("Last name", text: $lastName)
                .focused($focusedField, equals: .lastName)
        }
        .onAppear {
            focusedField = .firstName
        }
    }
}

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And here’s the code using defaultFocus(), suitable for use on macOS:

struct ContentView: View {
    enum FocusedField {
        case firstName, lastName
    }

    @State private var firstName = ""
    @State private var lastName = ""
    @FocusState private var focusedField: FocusedField?

    var body: some View {
        Form {
            TextField("First name", text: $firstName)
                .focused($focusedField, equals: .firstName)

            TextField("Last name", text: $lastName)
                .focused($focusedField, equals: .lastName)
        }
        .defaultFocus($focusedField, .firstName)
    }
}

Hopefully defaultFocus() comes to iOS in a future update!