Question: How to set selection color via code or CSS?

[PavelTurk]

I want to set selection color (currently blue) for example to yellow. Could anyone say how to do it via CSS? If it is not possible via CSS, how to do it programmatically?

[Jugen]

Try the following:

.main-selection {
    -fx-fill: yellow;
}

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen Yes, it helped. Thank you very much.

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen Could you say if it is possible to set different colors for background and foreground? For example, I want to do color inversion in selection like this:

[Jugen]

It's not currently possible. To do this we'd have to store the current styling of the text, change it for the highlight, and then restore the styling when the selection clears. Also taking into account that the user may cut and paste the selection somewhere else in the the document.

You could implement this yourself by listening for selection changes and then doing the above admin ....

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen Could you explain, when richtextfx makes selection (using -fx-fill) doesn't it override -fx-background-color? If so, does it store previous -fx-background-color value?

I am asking, as I can't understand - when selection occurs, text styles should be updated. If they are, then they should be stored. If they are stored, why we can't add foreground color values for storing....

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen Besides there is -rtfx-background-color color. That is under selection and is restored:

.styled-text-area .found {
    -fx-fill: -color-fg-found;
    -rtfx-background-color: -color-bg-found;
}

Maybe we could and something like -rtfx-fill that it also could be restored?

[Jugen]

@PavelTurk Sorry for the delay. I had another look at this and found out that I'm completely mistaken!

First off, I forgot that Text nodes don't have a background color attribute. So RichTextFX creates background Path nodes for any -rtfx-background-color styles. These background Paths are rendered below any SelectionPaths, which means that selections are painted over any Text background color.

RichTextFX/richtextfx/src/main/java/org/fxmisc/richtext/ParagraphText.java

Lines 79 to 86 in 9405b4f

	// Note: order of children matters because later children cover up earlier children:
	// towards children's 0 index:
	// background shapes
	// selection shapes - always add to selectionShapeStartIndex
	// border shapes
	// text
	// underline shapes
	// caret shapes

Second, RichTextFX does have incomplete code to support a -fx-highlight-text-fill CSS property. However it's not active as the implementation requires Text.selectionFillProperty to work, which JavaFX only does correctly for the first Text node. See here (Note that the code provided in the PR is outdated).

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen Thank you very much for your reply and time! But why wasn't that PR merged? I've checked it, it has so little code. Maybe we could update it?

[Jugen]

It wasn't merged because of the JavaFX bug :(

[PavelTurk]

@Jugen as I understand the problem is in https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8149134. At the same time, this issue relates to https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8300569 that is in progress.If JDK-8300569 is resoled in the nearest future, I will try to ask about JDK-8149134 in mailing list. Who knows...