Changing highlight text color / using Highlighters

Question

I've subclassed JTextArea, and among other things, am trying to add the functionality for drawing the active selection even when the TextArea doesn't have focus. I've overridden processFocusEvent like so:
public void processFocusEvent(FocusEvent e){
        Highlighter h = this.getHighlighter();
         if (e.getID() == e.FOCUS_GAINED){
            //remove the inactive highlight
            h.removeAllHighlights();
        //this will put the selection highlight back in for us, among other things,
        //if we just gained focus.
        super.processFocusEvent(e);
        //now add the inactive-selection highlight if we just lost focus
        if (e.getID() == e.FOCUS_LOST){
            try {
                h.addHighlight(
                        this.getSelectionStart(),
                        this.getSelectionEnd(),
                        new DefaultHighlighter.DefaultHighlightPainter(
                            new Color(212,212,212)
            } catch (Exception ex){
                ex.printStackTrace();
    }and it works quite nicely. Notice that I draw the inactive selection gray.
There's a slight problem with this: JTextArea doesn't treat the text in the highlighted section any differently, as opposed to how it would when the component is focused (i.e. rendering it in the highlighted text color). I'm guessing this is because it knows that it's not focused, and therefore assumes that there's no highlighting to be drawn. So as a result, all text in the text area is rendered in the same color --- the foreground color --- when the textArea doesn't have focus, regardless of what is being highlighted. For this reason, setSelectedTextColor() has no effect.
But I want to be able to change the highlighted text color, since, in theory, the user's system could be configured to show text in the exact same gray that I'm highlighting with. I want to just be able to set it to be white or black.
I am rather averse to using a TextPane, since what I'm writing is designed to edit plain text, and a TextArea has many wheels that I don't want to reinvent, like setTabSize(), for example.
Clearly, there is code already in place somewhere to draw text a different color for highlighted portions of a TextArea. Is there some way I could perhaps trick only the drawing code into thinking that it has focus? What is the cleanest way to accomplish what I want, i.e. the way that involves rewriting the least amount of functionality?
Any suggestions/leads would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's a better way to keep the selection visible. All those hard-coded colors are a big no-no, but this is just to demonstrate the technique.
import java.awt.Color;
import javax.swing.text.DefaultCaret;
import javax.swing.text.Highlighter;
import javax.swing.text.DefaultHighlighter;
* usage:
* textComponent.setCaret(new GhostCaret());
public class GhostCaret extends DefaultCaret
  private static final Highlighter.HighlightPainter unfocusedPainter =
      new DefaultHighlighter.DefaultHighlightPainter(new Color(230, 230, 210));
  private boolean isFocused;
  protected Highlighter.HighlightPainter getSelectionPainter()
    return isFocused ? SimpleHighlighter.defaultPainter : unfocusedPainter;
  public void setSelectionVisible(boolean hasFocus)
    if (hasFocus != isFocused)
      isFocused = hasFocus;
      super.setSelectionVisible(false);
      super.setSelectionVisible(true);
      getComponent().setSelectedTextColor(isFocused ? Color.WHITE : Color.BLACK);
}