Uitextview Disabling Text Selection

UITextView disabling text selection

Issue How disable Copy, Cut, Select, Select All in UITextView has a workable solution to this that I've just implemented and verified:

Subclass UITextView and overwrite canBecomeFirstResponder:

- (BOOL)canBecomeFirstResponder {
    return NO;
}

Note that this disables links and other tappable text content.

UITextView: Disable selection, allow links

I find the concept of fiddling with the internal gesture recognizers a little scary, so tried to find another solution.
I've discovered that we can override point(inside:with:) to effectively allow a "tap-through" when the user isn't touching down on text with a link inside it:

// Inside a UITextView subclass:
override func point(inside point: CGPoint, with event: UIEvent?) -> Bool {

    guard let pos = closestPosition(to: point) else { return false }

    guard let range = tokenizer.rangeEnclosingPosition(pos, with: .character, inDirection: .layout(.left)) else { return false }

    let startIndex = offset(from: beginningOfDocument, to: range.start)

    return attributedText.attribute(.link, at: startIndex, effectiveRange: nil) != nil
}   

This also means that if you have a UITextView with a link inside a UITableViewCell, tableView(didSelectRowAt:) still gets called when tapping the non-linked portion of the text :)

How to disable a user's ability to select text in a UITextField or UITextView?

The quickest way is to set .isUserInteractionEnabled to false on your UITextView or UITextField

Disable text selection in UITextView

Here comes Swift working example

class TextView: UITextView {

    override func canPerformAction(action: Selector, withSender sender: AnyObject!) -> Bool {
        return false
    }

    override func gestureRecognizerShouldBegin(gestureRecognizer: UIGestureRecognizer!) -> Bool {
        if gestureRecognizer.isKindOfClass(UITapGestureRecognizer) && ((gestureRecognizer as UITapGestureRecognizer).numberOfTapsRequired == 1) {
            let touchPoint = gestureRecognizer.locationOfTouch(0, inView: self)
            let cursorPosition = closestPositionToPoint(touchPoint)
            selectedTextRange = textRangeFromPosition(cursorPosition, toPosition: cursorPosition)
            return true
        }
        else {
            return false
        }
    }

}

UITextView avoid text selection, but keep tappable links

Add this UITextViewDelegate textViewDidChangeSelection and comment out isEditable and isSelectable:

func textViewDidChangeSelection(_ textView: UITextView) {
    if textView.selectedTextRange != nil {
        textView.delegate = nil
        textView.selectedTextRange = nil
        textView.delegate = self
    }
}

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