Disable text selection in textarea

Question

I need to find a way to prevent users from selecting text in a textarea. The goal is to create a custom keyboard that is used to enter text in the textarea. I want users to be able to click on the textarea to set the caret position (which is already working right now). However, I don't want the users to be able to select certain parts of the inserted text, or there should at least be no visual indication of this. I have already tried a few things, such as the following CSS, but without success.

textarea {
    -moz-user-select: none;
    -webkit-user-select: none;
    -khtml-user-select: none;
    user-select: none;
}

The solution can be in CSS and/or JavaScript, and it only has to work in Google Chrome.

---

Disabling the textarea will not work for me. As I mentioned, I want users to be able to place the caret at certain positions by clicking on the location. If I would disable the textarea, this functionality would be lost.

Handcart

Unless I'm reading this wrong, wouldn't disabled do what you want? – Junia

#4712530 – Subservience

Disabling the text selection is easy... you're really asking how to disable text selection while still allowing users to click to place the cursor at a specific point? – Unipolar

Disabling the element will also prevent any keyboard actions from getting through, so that is probably not a good solution. – Thomasenathomasin

@BramW. well the answer by OPUS almost works; it's possible to navigate through the textarea content with arrow keys, but it's not possible to click in the content. Disabling selection I suppose also disables that (which seems wrong, but what can you do). – Thomasenathomasin

Answer 1

A combination of the "readonly" property and "user-select" property works.

The 2nd rule disables the highlighted border on select, which is a kind of visual selection.

The "unselectable" property seems to be Opera/IE specific.

the styles:

.noselect {
   cursor: default;
   -webkit-user-select: none;
   -webkit-touch-callout: none;
   -khtml-user-select: none;
   -moz-user-select: none;
   -ms-user-select: none;
   -o-user-select: none;
}

.noselect:focus {
   outline: none;
}

the markup:

<textarea class="noselect" readonly="readonly" unselectable="on"></textarea>

read-only might be more suitable than disabled (one can still toggle with JS, upon click event).

Uxoricide

@Gorky for reference: developers.google.com/web/updates/tags/removals ...if something had changed, it should be listed there (I'm in a hurry right now, no time to dig further). – Uxoricide

bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/… Looks like intentional for interop – Coumarin

Answer 2

<textarea unselectable="on" id="my_textarea"></textarea>

    *.unselectable {
   -webkit-user-select: none;
    }  

Subservience

Has no effect in Firefox. – Thomasenathomasin

thats because user wants it only in chrome.We can add moz-user-select:none – Subservience

oops sorry, I missed that, and you're also right that -moz-user-select: none works! I think this is the right answer. – Thomasenathomasin

Answer 3

Below code can help you

JS Code:

$(document).ready(function(){
   $('#txtInput').bind("cut copy paste",function(e) {
      e.preventDefault();
   });
});

Bouse

Answer 4

None of these solutions worked for me. Here's one of my own:

textarea::selection {
    background-color: transparent;
}

Eld

this is not correct solution what if someone copy text without knowing he selected the text – Giro

My purpose was only to hide the highlight. If you want to disable the text selection, user-select: none; works for me. – Eld

Answer 5

Or you can just put disabled="disabled" in textarea, like this :

<textarea disabled="disabled"></textarea>

Overmeasure

I tried just putting <textarea disabled></textarea> as w3schools and other suggest. This answer was the only way I was able to get it to work. – Penthouse

Answer 6

The answers didn't work for me, so I put a div with position: absolute; on top of the textarea, and it works perfectly.

Gaidano

Answer 7

You can disable it with javascript:

document.getElementById("textarea").disable='true';

Sexlimited

Answer 8

<textarea disabled="readonly"></textarea>

tested it is working.

Mireyamiriam

The OP does not want to make the textarea read-only, he would just want the select functionality to be disabled. – Megalo

by disabling the textarea, text selection can be done – Mireyamiriam

@AnkurDhanuka disabling the element will prevent keyboard events from being generated, so that probably won't work for the OP. – Thomasenathomasin