Turning Off the Caps Lock and Other Text Cursor Indicators on Your Mac

Starting with macOS Sonoma you will see an indicator under the text cursor when you have Caps Lock turned, are using dictation, or have just switch keyboard input types. Here's more about this and how you can turn it off if you really want to.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to turn Off the Caps Lock Indicator and other Cursor indicators in macOS.
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Now a new feature in macOS Sonoma shows an indicator under a text cursor when you have the Caps Lock on and in a few other situations. So for instance here I am in TextEdit. If I press the Caps Lock Key on my keyboard to turn on Caps Lock you can see how I get this indicator under it letting me know that the Caps Lock key is On. This could be very useful if you accidentally hit Caps Lock you know that what you're about to type is going to appear in all capital letters. You can correct it before you start typing. I like this feature personally. I never used the Caps Lock key so I like this indicator to see if I accidentally turn it on. I think other people might find it useful if they turn on the Caps Lock key just to type a word or two and want to get reminded that it is on before typing any more. 
But some people don't like it and I understand some software has you turn on the Caps Lock key for other reasons so it could be a little bothersome to have this. A few other things about this feature. First, people get confused over this because they often use the color to describe this. For instance what you see here is a blue indicator showing an up arrow. But it is only blue because that's the accent color in the app I'm using. In this case TextEdit. If I switch to Notes and I have the Caps Lock key on you can see it is yellow because yellow is the special accent color for Notes. So people will say I've got this blue indicator and other people say I've got this yellow indicator, or orange indicator and it gets confusing. It's just whatever the accent color is in the app. 
The other thing to know is there is more than just the Caps Lock indicator. There are few different ones. For instance if you use Dictation, and I'll use the default shortcut here to press Control twice on my keyboard, and it will turn on Dictation and you'll see an indicator that Dictation is on and which language I'm using. So you can see that right there. So that is a second way that this indicator is used. 
Another way is if you switch languages. So that would be in System Settings if you go to Keyboard and then in there you go to Input Sources and in here you add another source. So if you work in multiple languages you may have multiple input sources for your keyboards. Then it shows an indicator here and you can switch between them. Now using this doesn't show any special indicator for the cursor. But notice here in Settings above Text Input there is press fn key too. If you have that set to Change Input Source then look what happens when I use it here. It shows me all my Input Sources and it shows me the one currently selected. So that's another spot where this new Text Cursor Indicator is used. 
Now before I show you how to turn this Off one thing I should note is some of you may be watching because this appears when you accidentally hit the Caps Lock key. Your intention may be that you just don't want to accidentally hit Caps Lock. You could turn Caps Lock Off completely. This is certainly how I use it. In the forty plus years I've been using computers I never use the Caps Lock key. If I want to capitalize something I simply hold the Shift key down while I'm typing. Now I know other people prefer Caps Lock or may be using a special application where you want to have Caps Lock on for a long period of time so it is a little different for you. 
But if you do want to turn Caps Lock off then you want to go in Keyboard to Keyboard Shortcuts and then here in Modifier Keys, under the Caps Lock key, you want to simply turn it to No Action. Then the Caps Lock key won't work at all. You need to use the Shift key, which won't show this special indicator when you use it, to capitalize when you type. 
I know sometimes you want to type like a whole sentence or maybe more in capital letters for emphasis. But in word processing and Desktop Publishing Apps you don't really need to do this. As a matter of fact you shouldn't. For instance here I've got some text and let's say I want that to be all caps. I could retype it in caps or I can select it and in Pages here, under Format, under Style, there is a little settings control here and I can set this with Capitalization as All Caps. Now when I do that this appears as all caps but the important thing is that it remembers which letters were capitalized and which weren't. It is just displaying them all as caps. So you get the benefit of having everything in caps but if later on you change your mind, let's say this is three paragraphs, you can then go ahead and change it back to None and you get back everything exactly as you typed it. So it is useful to know this if that is the reason that you use the Caps Lock key. 
But let's look at turning this feature Off completely. You won't find any controls for this in Settings or anywhere else on your Mac. You have to go to Terminal to turn this Off. So I'm going to go to Launchpad here and search for Terminal. Then launch it. What you need to do is type a special command to set something in the system so that when it boots up this feature is disabled. Here's that command. Let's break it down. 
First, sudo. That basically is saying that you need to enter your User Password in order for this command to be executed. So it can't just be accidentally typed in and you have to have your User Account Password. 
Then defaults says we're going to handle some settings. We're going to write a new setting to a file. Then this is the file it's going to be written to. It's a file in the Library folder. Not your usual Library folder but the top level Library folder for all users. 
In there in the Preferences folder and then in a folder called FeatureFlags in a folder called Domain and then the file name, finally, is UIKit.plist. You've got to type this exactly. Capitalization matters. 
Then the setting that is going to be defined here is redesigned_text_cursor
So this is the setting that determines whether or not this appears and it is going to add a dictionary definition to this that Enabled is set to the boolean value of NO. So basically redesigned text cursor is going to be NO inside this UIKit.plist file. 
Now chances are you don't even have this file. As a matter of fact you probably don't even have the FeatureFlags folder in Library preferences. But this will create it. So, if you do this you'll actually get the file. You're going to have to enter your password. It should be the same as your User Account password. Know that your User Account definitely needs to be an Admin User Account. So if for some reason you're using a standard user account that probably won't work. 
So now it is set but nothing would have changed because you need to reboot first. Now some warnings here of course.  This is not supported by Apple. There's no place on Apple's website or in the macOS documentation that is going to tell you that you can do this. This is a setting that is kind of hidden. It's kind of a secret that people have discovered works to change this. So if you want to do everything absolutely properly on your Mac you shouldn't use this. You just need to learn to live with the new cursor indicators. Also in the future this may go away completely. In a future version of macOS the Setting may just be ignored and the cursor indicators are always there. But if you feel you really need to do this, you really want to get rid of these you can give this a try, if you're willing. 
Just go ahead and reboot your Mac. Obviously you shouldn't have any documents open or anything like that. It will prompt you to save them but it is a good idea just to make sure. Then you want to go to the Apple Menu and then Restart. 
So now that we have restarted we can notice that if we turn on Caps Lock key, which I just did, nothing happens. Nothing appears there. So that's Off. What about the other indicators? Well, if I were to turn on Dictation the new cursor indicator doesn't appear but it does revert to doing the previous behavior, which is to show this indicator. You can see that right there. So you may remember that from versions of macOS before Sonoma. The same thing for if you switch languages. So remember I pressed the fn key and you could see I get that indicator in the middle of the screen now showing me which language I'm in. That's how it worked before Sonoma. 
So considering those things still need to be supported in macOS Sonoma and beyond in order for that to work you can see why I'm skeptical that you'll be able to use this Terminal Command to change the setting in the future. The future versions of macOS simply may not have those things in there and therefore setting it to Yes may simply not work. We'll just have to wait and see but it seems to work fine now in Sonoma. 
Now you should not have turned this Off. You can use exactly the same command except change the No at the end to YES, like that in all caps. When you press return it will change the No to Yes inside of this preference here and then you Restart your Mac and you should have those cursor indicators back. 
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Here is the Terminal command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist redesigned_text_cursor -dict-add Enabled -bool NO

Comments: 2 Responses to “Turning Off the Caps Lock and Other Text Cursor Indicators on Your Mac”

lisa

6 months ago

thank you so much! this worked. I had to keep trying to get it to take the password, but I am finally free of the dread cursor arrow! It was particularly annoying in auto cad.

Angie

2 months ago

Another sanity-saving tip. Thank you so much, Gary. So glad to be rid of that caps lock indicator. I use English and Japanese keyboards and having the indicator return to a big box in the centre of the screen is absolutely fine. :)