NSTextField - White text on black background, but black cursor

Assuming that you are wanting to set the color of the insertion caret and not the mouse cursor then the suggestion of using setInsertionPointColor: should work.

However, you do not necessarily need to change from using NSTextField to NSTextView. The field editor for window that the NSTextField is in is an NSTextView. So when your NSTextField becomes the key view you could grab the field editor and call setInsertionPointColor: on that. You may need to reset the color when your field stops being the key view.

You can get the field editor by using NSWindow's fieldEditor:forObject: or NSCell's fieldEditorForView:.

If you have a subclass of NSTextField you can have it use a custom subclass of NSTextFieldCell and override -(NSText*)setUpFieldEditorAttributes:(NSText*)textObj. In that method you can set the insertion point color once and it will stay while the field editor is active for this text field. Though when the field editor is moved to another edit field the insertion point color will remain unless you reset it.

TextField Insertion Point Color

NSTextField *textField = self.textField;
NSColor *insertionPointColor = [NSColor blueColor];

NSTextView *fieldEditor = (NSTextView*)[textField.window fieldEditor:YES
                                                           forObject:textField];
fieldEditor.insertionPointColor = insertionPointColor;

Your best bet is probably to use NSTextView and - (void)setInsertionPointColor:(NSColor *)color.

Since in practice the NSText* returned by -currentEditor for an NSTextField is always an NSTextView*, I added the following code to my custom NSTextField subclass:

-(BOOL) becomeFirstResponder
{
    BOOL    success = [super becomeFirstResponder];
    if( success )
    {
        // Strictly spoken, NSText (which currentEditor returns) doesn't
        // implement setInsertionPointColor:, but it's an NSTextView in practice.
        // But let's be paranoid, better show an invisible black-on-black cursor
        // than crash.
        NSTextView* textField = (NSTextView*) [self currentEditor];
        if( [textField respondsToSelector: @selector(setInsertionPointColor:)] )
            [textField setInsertionPointColor: [NSColor whiteColor]];
    }
    return success;
}

So if you're already replacing this class because you're doing custom background drawing, this might be a more encapsulated solution. Maybe there's even a way to move this up into NSCell, which would be cleaner since NSCell is the one doing the drawing and knowing the colors anyway.