I haven't tried this recently but I _think_ if you set the area disabled you
won't be able to highlight it or select any of it:

   JTextArea myTextArea = new JTextArea("bla bla bla");
   myTextArea.setEnabled(false);

Of course, this will grey out the text too, which you might not like too
much since it makes the text harder to read.

If you simply want to prevent anyone from dragging and dropping all or part
of the text, I think

   myTextArea.setDragEnabled(false);

should do the job. The user will probably still be able to highlight parts
of the text area - again, I haven't tried this in a while so I could be
wrong - but they won't be able to drag it anywhere so they can't do much
harm.

--
Rhino

hijinks@gmail.com schrieb:

JTextComponent (and all of its subclasses: JTextArea, JTextField,
JEditorPane) has a method
  public void select(int selectionStart, int selectionEnd)

The swing text components can show html-formated text. I recommend
looking to the java tutorial for some help:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/uiswing/components/text.html

Using this you might search/replace words in your sourcecode
to insert html-color-style-tags. Best to use regular expressions
for searching and replacing :)

I remember to have written a makro programm in visual basic to
format pascal sourcecode for MS word. Ahh, ... Good old times.

As others have said, try setDragEnabled().

But the real question is: Why do you need to do this? If you are trying to
keep your source code "provate", so that is cannot be copied, you
are fooling yourself by making it non-draggable. What's to keep
the user from opening another window and typing it in manually?