Android text view color doesn't change when disabled

Question

When I call setEnabled(false) for a TextView object the text color doesn't change. I expected it will be changed to gray. If I remove the line of android:textColor in my XML file, it backs to normal.

Any ideas ?

Answer 1

I think what's happening is that since you're overriding the default textcolor it isn't inheriting the other textcolor styles. Try creating a ColorStateList for it and setting the textColor attribute to it instead of to a color.

In a color file (eg res/color/example.xml):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">
    <item android:state_enabled="false" android:color="@color/disabled_color" />
    <item android:color="@color/normal_color"/>
</selector>

then in your layout:

<TextView
    android:text="whatever text you want"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:textColor="@color/example" />

Note, I haven't done this in a while and I'm typing a lot of this from memory, so it may need a little tweaking. The ColorStateList docs (linked above) have a more fleshed-out example for the color XML file.