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How to hide the insertion caret in a webpage using CSS?
The caret is also known as the text cursor which acts as an indicator that displays on the screen and indicates where the text input will begin from. This helps the user to look at where he is adding the text. There are many user interfaces that will represent the caret like a thin vertical line or a box which will flash and it varies from browser to browser and interface to interface.
In this article, we are going to have a look at how we can hide the insertion caret in a webpage using CSS?
How to hide the insertion caret?
Insertion caret is the flashing vertical line which you might have seen in an input field which indicates that where the text has to be inserted. To hide the caret from input fields in our webpage, caret-color property is used in CSS. There are usually 3 values that are used with the property like auto, color and the transparent value. Let’s look at the syntax of the caret-color.
caret-color: transparent;
Let’s look at an example to understand the property better.
Example
In the example, we will be using the caret-color property and set its value to transparent so as to hide the caret on the webpage. Let’s look at the code so that we can understand this better.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>An Example of hiding the caret</title>
<style>
.hide {
caret-color: transparent;
}
body {
text-align: center;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>Once you click in the textbox below the cursor is visible.</p>
<input type="text"><br><br>
<p>In this next text box we made the cursor <b>transparent</b>.</p>
<input type="text" class="hide">
</body>
</html>
On executing the above code, you can see that we made 2 input fields. And then, in the 2nd field used the caret-color property and set it to transparent. So, when the user clicks on the first field, he will be able to see the caret whereas, in the second input field, the user will not be able to see the caret.
The caret-color property
The caret-color property will set the color of the vertical blinking line also known as the insertion caret as it often appears in input fields. The color of the caret can also be changed and there are different values used with the caret-color property most of them are auto, transparent and any color.
There are different carets used by different browsers like the navigation caret which can be moved around freely but in a non-editable format. An Example of using the caret-color property could be
caret-color:rgba(0,0,0,0);
The vertical line or the color of the caret can be set to any color from the rbga palette.
Let’s look at another example, so that, we can understand how to make the caret disappear using the caret-color property by setting its value to transparent.
Example
In the example, we are going to create 2 input fields again and in the first one we are going to use caret-color property and set its value to the color red which means now the caret’s color will be red and when it blinks, we will see a red color and in the second input field, we will use the caret-color property and set its value to transparent which will hide the caret even upon clicking the text field. Let’s look at the code.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<title>Example of the hiding the insertion caret</title>
<style>
.cursor {
caret-color: transparent;
}
body {
text-align: center;
}
.clr{
caret-color: red;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>Following textbox have colored insertion caret.</p>
<input type="text" class="clr"><br><br>
<p>Here we are trying to hide the insersion caret.</p>
<input type="text" class="cursor">
</body>
</html>
In the above code, you can see that we gave both the input fields 2 classes so as to make it easy to understand and to differentiate we used our caret-color property in the style section so as to hide the caret and set the color of the caret.
You can see in the above output that we have the “red coloured caret” and the “hidden input caret” which will work when the user clicks on the input field.
Elements in which we can see the caret
We can see the caret in the following elements −
<input type="text"> <input type="password"> <input type="search"> <input type="date"> <input type="time"> <input type="datetime-local"> <input type="number"> <input type="range"> <input type="email"> <input type="tel"> <input type="url">
Conclusion
Different browsers and user interfaces represent caret differently but most of them have a vertical thin line which flashes and it is also called as insertion text as it indicates the user where to start the text. The caret is most found in the input elements and the text area elements. We can use the caret-color property so as to edit the caret and the values which can be used are the color, auto and transparent.
In this article, we have learnt how we can use the caret-color property to hide the insertion caret from a webpage.
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