Question

Is it possible to make the item in “preferencses.xml” that will appear as “gray” (read-only, like “About/Version” from android main menu?) text without the possibility of interactive editing?

Answer 1

If you’d like to hard code this and only use xml:

<EditTextPreference
    android:key="PREF_KEY"
    android:enabled="false"
    android:selectable="false" />

If you’d like to be more dynamic, changing enabled-ness at runtime, you can do this in code (possibly in your settings activity’s onCreate):

    Preference pref =
        getPreferenceScreen().findPreference("PREF_KEY");
    pref.setEnabled(false);
    pref.setSelectable(false);

And as hwrdprkns points out, if you don’t need the dynamic route (your preference is never used as a real preference), you can use the base preference class instead of a subclass like EditTextPreference.