# How to disable text selection using CSS

> Learn how to disable text selection in CSS with the user-select: none rule and its browser prefixes, then re-enable it on elements with user-select: text.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2019-07-30 | Topics: [CSS](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/css/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/css-disable-text-selection/

By default browsers let us select the text in the browser using the keyboard, pressing the cmd-A combination on a Mac for example, or using the mouse.

How can you disable that, to make your web page behave more like an app and less like a document?

Use the `user-select: none;` CSS rule.

You need to use browser prefixes, as [https://caniuse.com/#feat=user-select-none](https://caniuse.com/#feat=user-select-none) tells us:

```css
-webkit-touch-callout: none;
  -webkit-user-select: none;
   -khtml-user-select: none;
     -moz-user-select: none;
      -ms-user-select: none;
          user-select: none;
```

One thing I use sometimes is to make all the app interface unselectable applying `user-select: none;` on the body element, then I can re-enable it on specific elements, using:

```css
user-select: text;
```