Title: Preventing the user from selecting text in a Memo control
Question: The trivial answer would be to set Enabled to False, but this has some undesirable side-effects... This articles uses some code to prevent the user from selecting text while keeping the rest of the look and feel intact.
Answer:
Preventing the user from selecting text in a Memo control
The easiest way would be to set the Enabled property of the Memo (or Edit) control to False so that the control cannot receive events. This drawback to this method is the user won't be able to scroll the text and the disabled text looks bad.
In order to prevent the user from writing in the memo, we set its ReadOnly property to True.
To prevent the user from selecting text with the mouse, we generate the handler of the MouseMove event of the control and write the following code:
procedure TForm1.Memo1MouseMove(Sender: TObject;
Shift: TShiftState; X, Y: Integer);
begin
if ssLeft in Shift then
Memo1.SelLength := 0;
end;
In order to prevent the user from performing a selection using the keyboard, we generate the handlers of the KeyDown and KeyUp events, assigning the OnKeyDown and OnKeyUp properties to the same procedure:
procedure TForm1.Memo1KeyDownUp(Sender: TObject;
var Key: Word; Shift: TShiftState);
begin
if (ssShift in Shift) and (Key in [VK_LEFT, VK_RIGHT, VK_UP,
VK_DOWN, VK_PRIOR, VK_NEXT, VK_HOME, VK_END]) then
Key := 0;
end;