Placeholder in TextArea

Hey,

I was wondering whether it was a conscious decision to not offer a placeholder for JTextArea. I’ve seen you are using the default logic from Java via reflection to draw a clipped String. I am assuming you didn’t implement this because it would require reimplementing the drawing and clipping a bit? Would you be accepting this as a PR if I was to try it with line wrapping AND clipping?

Alternatively a non wrapping version might already be better than nothing.

[DevCharly]

I was wondering whether it was a conscious decision to not offer a placeholder for JTextArea.

no, simply did not need it… 😉

I’ve seen you are using the default logic from Java via reflection to draw a clipped String. I am assuming you didn’t implement this because it would require reimplementing the drawing and clipping a bit?

yes, why reinvent/reimplement something that the JRE provides.

Would you be accepting this as a PR if I was to try it with line wrapping AND clipping?

Sure.

There is already some code in FlatLaf that splits a string and paints multiple lines:

https://github.com/JFormDesigner/FlatLaf/blob/d10bcfc72fda6156ab104e1c52835eeef4282b2c/flatlaf-core/src/main/java/com/formdev/flatlaf/ui/FlatToolTipUI.java#L121-L132

Maybe extract this to new method FlatUIUtils.drawMultiLineString( JComponent c, Graphics g, String text, int x, int y, int width, boolean clipLines ) and use it for TextArea placeholder too ?

[DevCharly]

Do you want a new property or reuse JTextField.placeholderText?

Reuse JTextField.placeholderText.

… without copying it’s code or manipulating it’s properties …

Since the license of OpenJDK is GPL, it is not allowed to copy code from OpenJDK to FlatLaf (Apache license).

You could create a second JTextArea and use that for rendering the placeholder text…