How to change the background colour of a wxTextCtrl without breaking the inactive selection colour?

Question

I want to signal an input error in a wxGTK application by setting the background of a text field to red on error and to white on successful input. However, when the background color is set via SetBackgroundColor , the background colour of an inactive selection is set to the same color. This leads to a very undesirable situation when setting the background colour to white: Since the foreground color for selected text is white, and the background colour for selected text is now also white, the text is unreadable.

How can I reset the colours on a wxTextCtrl so that inactive selected text has a grey background (the default setting before SetBackgroundColour)? SetBackgroundStyle( wxBG_STYLE_SYSTEM) was my first guess, but has no effect on wxGTK.

Code example:

#include <wx/textctrl.h>
#include <wx/frame.h>
#include <wx/defs.h>
#include <wx/app.h>

class App : public wxApp {
    bool OnInit() {
        wxFrame* frame = new wxFrame(NULL, wxID_ANY, wxT("Frame"));
        wxTextCtrl* text = new wxTextCtrl( frame, wxID_ANY, wxT("foo bar") );
        text->SetBackgroundStyle( wxBG_STYLE_COLOUR );
        text->SetBackgroundColour( *wxWHITE );
        frame->Show();
        return true;
    }
};

IMPLEMENT_APP( App );

Answer 1

You could try working with SetDefaultStyle, I didn't try this myself but here is some excerpt from the wxwidgets documentation:

text->SetDefaultStyle(wxTextAttr(*wxRED));
text->AppendText("Red text\n");
text->SetDefaultStyle(wxTextAttr(wxNullColour, *wxLIGHT_GREY));
text->AppendText("Red on grey text\n");
text->SetDefaultStyle(wxTextAttr(*wxBLUE);
text->AppendText("Blue on grey text\n");

This will most likely allow you to change the colour independantly of the text and/or change the colour of the text itself as well. Here is the link to the wxTextCtrl Documentation where I found this code snippet: http://docs.wxwidgets.org/2.8/wx_wxtextctrl.html

Regards, Roin

Answer 2

Tried this and it works:

  TextCtrl1->SetBackgroundColour(wxColour(0xFF,0xA0,0xA0));
  TextCtrl1->SetStyle(0, -1, TextCtrl1->GetDefaultStyle());