How to change color / appearance of EditText select handle / anchor?

Question

So I changed the style of the Holo Theme with the Holo Colors Generator and Action Bar Style Generator to my own color. But when I select text inside an edit text, the "markers" at the selected positions are still blue. How can I change it?

Answer 1

The worst part here was to find the "name" for this item and how it is called inside the theme. So I looked through every drawable in the android SDK folder and finally found the drawables named "text_select_handle_middle", "text_select_handle_left" and "text_select_handle_right".

So the solution is simple: Add these drawables with customized design/color to your drawable folder and add them to your theme style definition like:

<style name="MyCustomTheme" parent="@style/MyNotSoCustomTheme">         <item name="android:textSelectHandle">@drawable/text_select_handle_middle</item>         <item name="android:textSelectHandleLeft">@drawable/text_select_handle_left</item>         <item name="android:textSelectHandleRight">@drawable/text_select_handle_right</item> </style> 

Answer 2

I recognize this is really late, but if all you want to do is change the color of the handle, you just need to add the following to your styles.xml file.

<style name="ColoredHandleTheme">     <item name="colorControlActivated">@color/colorYouWant</item> </style> 

And then just set the theme on whatever activity is holding the EditText which you want to affect.

Or if you want to set it app-wide, you can do the following:

<style name="ColoredHandleThemeForWholeApp">     <item name="colorAccent">@color/colorYouWant</item> </style> 

And set that theme for the whole app.

Problem solved!