On macOS 14 Sonoma and later, Apple has added a small visual tweak to the user interface that makes it easier to see that Caps Lock is active on your Mac. When the Caps Lock key is activated, type only in capital letters and an arrow symbol will be displayed under the cursor.
You may of course wonder what use this is, you can see when typing and from the light on the keyboard that the Caps Lock is active. However, the indicator can be useful when entering a password, as these input fields are usually masked with dots or asterisks.
If you find the new Caps Lock indicator disturbing, you can choose to turn it off. However, you cannot do this in the system settings, but you have to use Terminal.
Disable Caps Lock indicator
You cannot disable the new Caps Lock indicator in macOS Sonoma and newer via your Mac’s system preferences. If you want to disable this you will have to use the Terminal command below.
Open the Terminal app from the Utilities folder on your Mac. You can easily place the command below on your clipboard via the ‘Copy’ button cmd⌘ + V paste into the Terminal window. Then press enter to execute the command.
$sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist redesigned_text_cursor -dict-add Enabled -bool NO
The command ensures that an extra setting is added to the UIKit.plist configuration file. The key ‘redesigned_text_cursor’ will be given the value ‘NO’ so that the new indicator will no longer be displayed.
NB! After executing the above command you should have your Mac Restart to make the change active. The settings in the plist are only read at start-up.
Re-enable Caps Lock indicator
You can undo disabling the Caps Lock indicator by running the Terminal command below. The command sets the key ‘redesigned_text_cursor’ to YES, making the indicator visible again.
$sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/UIKit.plist redesigned_text_cursor -dict-add Enabled -bool YES
NB! Also after this command you should restart your Mac Restart to make the change active.