How can you change the highlighted text color for a WPF TextBox?

Question

The WPF TextBox natively makes use of the System Highlight color for painting the background of selected text. I would like to override this and make it consistent since it varies by OS/user theme.

For ListBoxItems, there is a neat trick (see below) where you can override the resource key for the HighlightBrushKey to customize the System Highlight color in a focused setting:

<Style TargetType="ListBoxItem">
    <Style.Resources>
        <SolidColorBrush x:Key="{x:Static SystemColors.HighlightBrushKey}"
                         Color="LightGreen"/>
    </Style.Resources>
</Style>

The same trick does not work for the TextBox unfortunately. Does anyone have any other ideas, besides "override the ControlTemplate"?

NOTE: This behavior appears to be added to WPF 4.

Answer 1

Since .NET 4, TextBoxBase.SelectionBrush

You can specify the brush that highlights selected text by setting the SelectionBrush and SelectionOpacity properties. The SelectionOpacity property specifies the opacity of the SelectionBrush.

eg.

<TextBox SelectionBrush="Red" SelectionOpacity="0.5"
         Foreground="Blue" CaretBrush="Blue">