Auto scroll JTextArea on middle mouse button click

Question

How to auto scroll JTextArea on middle mouse button click? To be clear, when we click the mouse wheel (middle button) in Firefox (for example) and push it down/up we will be able to scroll the page automatically when we release the middle button, we can alo see a round icon at the point of middle button click.

Here is a screenshot of it.

I think there is no such functionality for JTextArea in Java. Is there any hack to implement it.

Any answer is appreciated.

Answer 1

To determine which of the Mouse buttons is pressed, these three methods from SwingUtilities could help you:

isLeftMouseButton

isMiddleMouseButton

isRightMouseButton

Based on the mouse button clicked, you can take appropriate action to scroll the JTextArea programmatically. Probably, you can use something like this:

textArea.setCaretPosition(textArea.getDocument().getLength()); -> to move to the end of the JTextArea

You can look at this link to get a good idea of positioning the cursor position in JTextArea