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androidtextview

How to change the cursor color of textview when selecting text

I am trying to change the highlight color and the cursor color when selecting text in a text view. Through stackoverflow posts, I was able to change the highlight color using

textView.highlightColor = ContextCompat.getColor(context, R.color.red_1)

I wanted to change the cursor color to a custom color. By going through a lot of stackoverflow posts, one of the answers suggested to change the accent color. But I don't want to change that because it'll affect a lot of UI properties in my app. I couldn't find any other solution.

enter image description here

Solution

  • Changing the handle color with defining a @style through Theme:

    <style name="MyCustomTheme" parent="@style/MyNotSoCustomTheme">
        <item name="android:textSelectHandle">@drawable/text_select_handle_middle</item>
        <item name="android:textSelectHandleLeft">@drawable/text_select_handle_left</item>
        <item name="android:textSelectHandleRight">@drawable/text_select_handle_right</item>
</style>

    For doing it programmatically:

    try {
    final Field fEditor = TextView.class.getDeclaredField("mEditor");
    fEditor.setAccessible(true);
    final Object editor = fEditor.get(editText);

    final Field fSelectHandleLeft = editor.getClass().getDeclaredField("mSelectHandleLeft");
    final Field fSelectHandleRight = editor.getClass().getDeclaredField("mSelectHandleRight");
    final Field fSelectHandleCenter = editor.getClass().getDeclaredField("mSelectHandleCenter");

    fSelectHandleLeft.setAccessible(true);
    fSelectHandleRight.setAccessible(true);
    fSelectHandleCenter.setAccessible(true);

    final Resources res = context.getResources();

    fSelectHandleLeft.set(editor, res.getDrawable(R.drawable.text_select_handle_left));
    fSelectHandleRight.set(editor, res.getDrawable(R.drawable.text_select_handle_right));
    fSelectHandleCenter.set(editor, res.getDrawable(R.drawable.text_select_handle_middle));
} catch (final Exception ignored) {
}

    For changing the selected text color you can set textColorHighlight in xml as:

    android:textColorHighlight="#ff0000"

    through style you can achieve that with:

    <item name="android:textColorHighlight">@color/m_highlight_green</item>