How to have different text selection-related colors of multiple EditTexts on same Activity?

Question

Background

On a large app I work on, there is an Activity that has a background of some color, which is very similar to the one we have for the caret and text selection handles and bottom line. That's why I've set "colorControlActivated" color to be white (designer decided of this color).

The problem

The Activity also has a dialog, which has an EditText, but doesn't have this special background, so it seems as if the caret of the EditText, and the text selection handles and bottom line - all do not exist.

That's because "colorControlActivated" is set in the style of the Activity, and as I've noticed, cannot be set to a specific EditText.

If I don't set it, the EditText in the dialog looks ok, but not the one in the other place (with the background).

In order to make this question here simple, I ask only about 2 EditText on the same Activity layout.

So here are 2 screenshots of this issue:

default selection color :

white selection color:

What I've tried

I tried to set a different style for each EditText, but I failed. I also tried to inflate the EditText manually (which I do anyway in the original large app), with ContextThemeWrapper and a different style for each, but it didn't seem to work either. I also tried to create the LayoutInflater from the application-context instead.

None of those helped.

Here's the sample project code, that I tried to perform the tests on:

activity_main.xml

<LinearLayout
    xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools"
    android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="match_parent" android:orientation="vertical"
    tools:context="com.example.user.myapplication.MainActivity">


    <FrameLayout
        android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:background="#008678"
        android:paddingBottom="10dp" android:paddingTop="10dp">

        <EditText
            android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center"
            android:hint="put text here"
            android:text="some text to select in similar color of default selection color"/>

    </FrameLayout>

    <FrameLayout
        android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:background="#f4f4f4"
        android:paddingBottom="10dp" android:paddingTop="10dp">

        <EditText
            android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_gravity="center"
            android:hint="put text here" android:text="some text to select in almost white color background"/>

    </FrameLayout>
</LinearLayout>

styles.xml

<resources>

    <style name="AppTheme" parent="Theme.AppCompat.Light.DarkActionBar">
        <item name="colorControlActivated">#fff</item>
    </style>

</resources>

The MainActivity has nothing special but the default stuff (setContentView...) .

Note that in reality, the background is white for the dialog, so the caret etc are not noticeable at all. I only changed it here so that you see the issue.

The question

1. How can I have the caret (and text selection handles and bottom line) colors to be different for the 2 EditTexts?

2. Back to the original code (which is not written here), is there an easy way to make it work for dialogs too, so that the EditText there would have a different color for the caret than the one of the Activity that hosts it ?

Answer 1

Use spans.

Example:

final SpannableStringBuilder sb = new SpannableStringBuilder("your text here");

// Span to set text color to some RGB value
final ForegroundColorSpan fcs = new ForegroundColorSpan(Color.rgb(158, 158, 158)); 

// Span to make text bold
final StyleSpan bss = new StyleSpan(android.graphics.Typeface.BOLD); 

// Set the text color for first 4 characters
sb.setSpan(fcs, 0, 4, Spannable.SPAN_INCLUSIVE_INCLUSIVE); 

// make them also bold
sb.setSpan(bss, 0, 4, Spannable.SPAN_INCLUSIVE_INCLUSIVE); 

yourTextView.setText(sb);

Edit: there is nice solution described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4897379/1378564