I'm trying to prevent any key from altering the text in a Flex TextArea. I don't want to set the editable property to false, because I want the caret to be visible for a 'current position' indicator, so that the user knows where a search he initiates will start from.

I've added event handlers for change and textInput, as well as keyUp and keyDown that do an 'event.preventDefault' as well as a 'event.stopImmediatePropagation'. This works just fine for most keys, with the exception of backspace and delete.

Is there any way to prevent these from doing anything ?