Cursor not showing with BackgroundColorSpan

I use BackgroundColorSpan

to highlight certain text inside EditText

. The problem I am facing is that the textbox cursor is not visible if the color is 100% alpha and it is very difficult to see from lower alpha.

I did some digging through the code EditText

and Editor

(used to paint the text in EditText

) and I found that internally the Editor.onDraw(...)

cursor is colored before the layout (which in turn is the text paint):

    if (highlight != null && selectionStart == selectionEnd && mCursorCount > 0) {
>>      drawCursor(canvas, cursorOffsetVertical);
        // Rely on the drawable entirely, do not draw the cursor line.
        // Has to be done after the IMM related code above which relies on the highlight.
        highlight = null;
    }

    if (mTextView.canHaveDisplayList() && canvas.isHardwareAccelerated()) {
        drawHardwareAccelerated(canvas, layout, highlight, highlightPaint,
                cursorOffsetVertical);
    } else {
>>      layout.draw(canvas, highlight, highlightPaint, cursorOffsetVertical);
    }

      

        
        
        
      

    

Does anyone know how I can reverse this behavior? The only options I can think of right now are to either draw a cursor or do some kind of reflection in voodoo. Both seem a bit crowded.

Update:

I've created a bug report for this tracker on Android: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=172001