differentiating dragging and selecting in Java's JTextArea

My Java application has several JTextAreas that the user can move around. I achieve this by adding a mouse motion drag listener to it.

  public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) {
    int deltaX = e.getXOnScreen() - screenX;
    int deltaY = e.getYOnScreen() - screenY;

    setLocation(myX + deltaX, myY + deltaY);
  }

I am having a problem differentiating when the user wants to select text within the JTextArea开发者_Python百科 and when they want to drag it around. Any ideas?

I would use a modifier, for example control e.isControlDown(), or another mouse button to drag the component.

You may want to handle the first mouse down, check to see if text is selected. If the mouse pointer is on the text then set it to a state to identify it as a drag.

Use viewToModel() to obtain caret position of pressed point. Check whether the caret position is between getSelectionStart() and getSelectionEnd(). If it's in selected region start drag.