RFR: 4512626: Non-editable JTextArea provides no visual indication of keyboard focus

[Alexander Zuev]

On Wed, 7 Dec 2022 10:52:08 GMT, Sergey Bylokhov <serb at openjdk.org> wrote:

> > The library does not provide an ability to set caret to visible permanently in case of text component being non-editable. Every time focus will change the caret will change too. One would have to implement a custom caret that overrides this logic.
> 
> If that is not possible I suggest providing that functionality so applications will be able to use that. Probably even provide some predefined cursors, like "faded"/"blurred"/nonblinked/etc. That could be configured per L&F as well.

That would be a nice feature to have but right now we have an issue where default behaviour of the component defies the VPAT guidelines. We can argue about the type of cursor to use but lack of caret makes focus invisible and keyboard selection - while possible - very clunky. So i stay by my decision to avoid hiding the caret and make it non-blinking so we can easily distinguish between editable and non-editable text components. If and when in the future we add the better caret support for text states we might make the default non-editable caret faded or dithered or something along the lines but for now i propose this.

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PR: https://git.openjdk.org/jdk/pull/11408