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2.4 MBP, Mac OS X (10.6.7), 1983 biodiesel Vanagon
I'm also looking for a contrasting i-beam in xcode 4. The standard grey makes working with a dark background pretty much unusable. Did you find a solution?
You are right but it also tells you that you'll be able to select and copy text, that's not editing for sure but it requires a beam pointer to show where the selection starts doesn't it ?
sorry for the late answer.
Terminal uses its own "shadowed" i-beam (black with a white shadow) that makes it visible on a dark background.
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Resources/ShadowedIBeam.tiff
Other third-party Mac text editors, such as TextMate, and more recently, Sublime, have supplied custom i-beams. Others (Eclipse, Komodo) have not done so yet (AFAIK), but may have to do something soon to address this if Apple continues to ignore it. BBEdit, I believe is still a Carbon app, and apparently this issue affects only Cocoa apps.
It's a ridiculous oversight, and Apple really ought to do something about it at the OS level, rather than force every editor to supply an alternate i-beam. If you haven't done so already, send a message to Apple Feedback for OS X and ask them to fix it ASAP.
I spent most of my weekend figuring this out, but the i-beam cursor in XCode CAN Be edited. It's simply a TIFF file in the following location for XCode 3.2.6 (and earlier, I assume, but have not tested):
/Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/XcodeEdit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/T Ibeam.tiff
XCode 4.1 has the same file but it does not affect the i-beam in the main editor (I assume it's used somewhere, though). Instead, the main editor in XCode 4.1 uses this file: /Developer/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DVTKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DVTI beamCursor.tiff
XCode does NOT use the system-wide i-beam cursor as everyone I found talking about it stated as if it was a known fact. If I hadn't believed those people, I wouldn't have spent two days figuring out how to alter the system i-beam cursor by editing /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/ CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics only to find that xcode's ibeam doesn't change.
I just tried all those tricks with Xcode.app in 10.8 and none of them fixed it. I even emptied the cache to no avail.
Pretty aggravating problem.
It's frustrating they have to relocate files in seemingly every release, but I did a search in Mountain Lion:
find / -name '*Ibeam*' -print
and found the i-beam cursors are now here in XCode 4.4:
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/OtherFrameworks/XcodeEdit.framework/Versions/A/ Resources/TIbeam.tiff
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTKit.framework/Versions/A/Re sources/DVTIbeamCursor.png
/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTKit.framework/Versions/A/Re sources/DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png
Editing DVTIbeamCursor.png was enough to change the i-beam in the main editor on my system. I'm guessing DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png will be used on a retina display and who knows if TIbeam.tiff is even used anymore since they didn't update it to png.
Ah yes, success at last! I modified the image at
open /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTKit.framework/Versions/A/Resources/DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png
and wouldn't you know it works! My I-beam cursor is large and visible on black background in Xcode! I even left a little black in there so it will be visible on a white background. here is the image in case anyone doesn't have image editing software:
You would have to replace your DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png file with this one and restart Xcode 🙂
Nice and bright cursor now!
More hints. Any Xcode update will overwrite the hacked Ibeam image, so I moved the image to my userfolder and symlinked it to the original location:
file=/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/SharedFrameworks/DVTKit.fr amework/Versions/A/Resources/DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png rm $file; ln -s ~/Xcode/DVTIbeamCursor@2x.png $file
Your path at the end will be wherever the image is stored. I also added the Terminal commands to the PNGs Comment field, so after updates all I need to do is open the image, copy the commands and fix the Ibeam.
This solution only works with the Xcode.app in /Applications, not older versions in /Developer/.
Hooray!
Here's the cursor I use:
I find the black outline makes it easier to see when it happens to be over blocks of bright text. Also note that the hot spot (where the mouse click is registered) is located where the black lines cross in the original cursor because that cursor was intended to be used on a white background, so the white lines in the cursor above are all where the original black lines were.
Still hard to believe Apple has a "Dusk" theme as their second color theme and yet they never bothered to change the ibeam to work on that theme. Then again, I never had a huge problem with it until we moved and I now sit in front of a bright window that makes my screen appear dimmer and the default ibeam much harder to see.
XCode 4: Editor's pointer I-beam is invisible
