Swing Hacks

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Chapter 7

C H A P T E R S E V E N

Text

Hacks 48–55

Text handling pervades the Swing API, from the labeling of a JButton to

handling styled text in a

JTextArea. When we talk about hacking Swing’s

text handling, we often mean two different things: hacking into the repre-

sentation of the text (say, by making it searchable), or hacking into how that

text is displayed. This chapter will help you see that Swing text isn’t just

about little

JTextFields for entering your username.

H A C K

#48

Make Text Components Searchable Hack #48

This hack will show you how to add incremental search to a text area as a

simple document listener, making it very easy to integrate with your existing

software.

Many years ago, text editors had either no searching capabilities or a straight

word search only. You would type a word into a dialog box and the pro-

gram would search for that word, moving to its first location in the docu-

ment. If you were lucky, there was a command to search again, instead of

starting the process over. Then one day Emacs introduced a new kind of

searching. The program would search as you typed in each character, updat-

ing the cursor with each keystroke. To search again, you only had to hit the

Return key. If you wanted a less specific search, you could just hit the Back-

space key and remove letters. Everything updated in real time. Incremental

searching was born.

Most GUI toolkits—Java Swing included—do ...