Bit of a niggle with Swing text input

[David Garratt]

I appreciate Swing applications are not as main stream as they once were - but I'm still creating them.

I have one niggle which I've had since "for ever" which maybe someone has worked around.

Lets say you have a frame which has a text input field on it with some text populated and you want to replace it with something else.

Now you can place the cursor at the end of the existing text and click backspace to remove it one character at a time,

or you can do what I prefer which is to use the mouse to highlight all of the text and then click backspace just once.

The problem is that if you use the second approach and then start typing then you end up with a single character which appears to be highlighted and gets overtyped each time you type a letter.

Kinda annoying

Is there a cunning way to prevent this behavoir - if I've removed all of the text then I should be able to just resume typing without this (I don't know what to call it) odd behavior.

I have other apps which I am not the author of which do the same - so it's not my Java code which is causing it.

Some peculiarity of Java Swing

Dave

[Rob Spoor]

You can use Ctrl+A to select all text instead of using the mouse. You can then also use delete, it will work the same as backspace.

I've tried your way (select all with the mouse, backspace, then start typing) but there's no highlight (both Java 11 and Java 23 on Windows). What Java and OS are you using?

[Tim Holloway]

I usually do a "select all" on the text in that field when it gains focus. Been doing that since long before there was a Java, much less a Swing.

Most of the time, that is what I want. To completely replace the entire field. And if it isn't, I just de-select the text and cursor to where I want to change it.