A default implementation of Caret. The caret is rendered as a vertical line in the color specified by the CaretColor property of the associated JTextComponent. It can blink at the rate specified by the BlinkRate property.
This implementation expects two sources of asynchronous notification. The timer thread fires asynchronously, and causes the caret to simply repaint the most recent bounding box. The caret also tracks change as the document is modified. Typically this will happen on the event dispatch thread as a result of some mouse or keyboard event. The caret behavior on both synchronous and asynchronous documents updates is controlled by UpdatePolicy property. The repaint of the new caret location will occur on the event thread in any case, as calls to modelToView are only safe on the event thread.
The caret acts as a mouse and focus listener on the text component it has been installed in, and defines the caret semantics based upon those events. The listener methods can be reimplemented to change the semantics. By default, the first mouse button will be used to set focus and caret position. Dragging the mouse pointer with the first mouse button will sweep out a selection that is contiguous in the model. If the associated text component is editable, the caret will become visible when focus is gained, and invisible when focus is lost.
The Highlighter bound to the associated text component is used to render the selection by default. Selection appearance can be customized by supplying a painter to use for the highlights. By default a painter is used that will render a solid color as specified in the associated text component in the SelectionColor property. This can easily be changed by reimplementing the {@link #getSelectionPainter getSelectionPainter}method.
A customized caret appearance can be achieved by reimplementing the paint method. If the paint method is changed, the damage method should also be reimplemented to cause a repaint for the area needed to render the caret. The caret extends the Rectangle class which is used to hold the bounding box for where the caret was last rendered. This enables the caret to repaint in a thread-safe manner when the caret moves without making a call to modelToView which is unstable between model updates and view repair (i.e. the order of delivery to DocumentListeners is not guaranteed).
The magic caret position is set to null when the caret position changes. A timer is used to determine the new location (after the caret change). When the timer fires, if the magic caret position is still null it is reset to the current caret position. Any actions that change the caret position and want the magic caret position to remain the same, must remember the magic caret position, change the cursor, and then set the magic caret position to its original value. This has the benefit that only actions that want the magic caret position to persist (such as open/down) need to know about it.
Warning: Serialized objects of this class will not be compatible with future Swing releases. The current serialization support is appropriate for short term storage or RMI between applications running the same version of Swing. As of 1.4, support for long term storage of all JavaBeans™ has been added to the java.beans package. Please see {@link java.beans.XMLEncoder}.
@author Timothy Prinzing
@see Caret