Is there a way to customise Java's setEnabled(false)?

Question

Let's say you have a JCheckBox you want to use as an on/off indicator. You use setEnabled(false) to disable mouse clicks on the JCheckBox. But setEnabled(false) also grays out the checkBox and the checkBox's text. Is there a way to customise setEnabled(false) so that the graying out does not happen?

If that's not possible, is the only solution something along the lines of customising a ButtonModel?

Answer 1

You can subclass JCheckBox and override processMouseEvent/processKeyEvent to not do anything.

public class ReadOnlyCheckBox extends JCheckBox {
    public ReadOnlyCheckBox (String text, boolean selected) {
        super(text,selected);
    }

    protected void processKeyEvent(KeyEvent e) {
    }

    protected void processMouseEvent(MouseEvent e) {

    }
}