Avoid event grab during motion in Tkinter - python

Is it possible in Tkinter to avoid the event grab which occures when you press a mouse button over a widget and keep it pressed while you move the mouse?
I want to register the mouse button and then track all widgets the user enters while he moves his mouse with the button pressed. When the user releases the mouse button the application executes the same action for all tracked widgets.
The following code should explain what I want to do.
# Set a tracking flag
widget.bind('<Button>', start_tracking)
# Add the entered widget to the tracked widgets, if the tracking flag is set
widget.bind('<Enter>', add_to_tracked_widgets)
# Execute an action for every tracked widget; unset the flag
widget.bind('<ButtonRelease>', end_tracking)
I took a look at the grab_current and grab_status methods, but they always returned None.
Python version is 3.4.1.

This is probably the most complicated way to do this, but okay.
One thing that makes this more complicated is Tkinter itself, because event.widget still refers to the widget that was clicked on initally. A different event we can use is Motion which is activated when the mouse moves inside a widget.
tk.bind("<Motion>", add_tracked)
I think you can implement the list and state variables yourself, so we come to the add_tracked method (I just renamed it, it's your add_to_tracked_widgets):
def add_tracked(event):
if tracking:
# Get coordinated of the event and use the master window method to determine
# wich widget lays inside these.
widget = tk.winfo_containing(event.x_root, event.y_root)
# Since 'Motion' creates many events repeatedly, you have to convert this
# list into a set to remove duplicates.
widgets.append(widget)

Related

Python / tkinter: Events: call a function by mouse on widget

I would like to improve my program, I just do not know how.
I want that an event starts, when the users mouse is over a tkinter's widget.
This...
button.bind("<Motion>", lambda eff: callback())
... is working, but the users needs to move the mouse for call the function.
Is there a way to start, for example, every x seconds the function while the mouse is over the widget?
I need it to display an integer that changes constantly as text of a button or a label while the mouse is over the button or label.
Do you have any Ideas?
Thanks for your attention,
Lukas
You can bind a function to <Enter> to trigger a function when the mouse enters a widget, and you can bind to <Leave> to trigger when it leaves.
The <Enter> binding can run a function that starts updating the label periodically using after. The <Leave> binding can set a flag that the update function checks in order to know to stop updating.
There are many questions and answers on this site about using after to do something periodically. For example, How to use the after method to make a callback run periodically?

Is it possible to scroll Tkinter Listboxes without a scrollbar?

I would like to create GUI on my RPi so that I can scroll through Listbox like I do in my iPhone, without the use of a scrollbar. In other words, by just touching the listbox and 'flicking' your finger up/down, I would like to be able to scroll.
Can this scrolling method be done with TKinter or any GUI for RPi?
Yes it is.
Just have a look how the binding of scrollbars work.
How can you achieve the desired effect? Bin Mouse-Move events (touch move is nothing else) and use it to connect it to yview / xview depending on what scroll you want to have.
(e.g. check the direction your mouse moves inside your callback and use that information to trigger the scrolling event.)
If further help is needed, let us know.
Edit:
Here some "dummy-code"...
# this is your callback bound to mouse-move event
def mouse_move_callback(event):
# use event.y with a previous remembered y value to determine
# directions
directions = 1 # just as an example, could also be -1
# scroll the listbox vertically.
# to increase scrolling speed, either multiply counter by some value >1
# or replace 'units' which means scroll 1 character in the current setting
# by 'pages' for larger steps. 'pages' should scroll the visible
# area of the listbox further.
listbox.yview_scroll(1, 'units')
You could also use mouse button press and mouse button release to trigger the actions. Mouse button press would then store an y value (beginn of scroll) and mouse button release would be bound to the above callback.

how to disable the window close button in pygame?

In a pygame application window, the minimize, resize and close buttons are present. Is there a way to disable the close(X) button?
I don't think there is, because some window managers don't give you the ability to remove the close button. But you can write an event handler such that the close button does whatever you want, including nothing.
Why do you want to prevent the user from closing? If it's just a matter that you would rather provide an in-game "quit" button that confirms and/or saves before quitting, you can perform the same task when the user hits the close button.
Just for the record, another option would be to pass the following argument to the set_mode() method call:
pygame.display.set_mode(..., flags = pygame.NOFRAME)
This however makes the whole frame go away, including the top strip to move the window around and the other buttons, such as minimize, so it's rather overkill for just getting rid of the X button.

How to specify a full click in Python Tkinter

The following python line will bind the method "click" to the event when the user presses the mouse button while the pointer is on the widget; no matter where the pointer is when she releases the button.
self.bind('<Button-1>',self.click)
If I use "ButtonRelease" instead of "Button" in the code, it seems that the method "click" will be called for the widget on which the mouse was pressed after the button release; no matter where you release it.
1- Isn't there a neat way to make it call the bound method only if the mouse button was released on my widget; no matter where it was pressed?
2- Isn't there neat way to tell it to react only in case of a full click (press and release both on the same widget)?
1- Isn't there a neat way to make it
call the bound method only if the
mouse button was released on my
widget; no matter where it was
pressed?
2- Isn't there neat way to tell it to
react only in case of a full click
(press and release both on the same
widget)?
No "neat" way, because, as Tkinter's docs say:
When you press down a mouse button
over a widget, Tkinter will
automatically "grab" the mouse
pointer, and mouse events will then be
sent to the current widget as long as
the mouse button is held down.
and both of your desires are incompatible with this automatic grabbing of the mouse pointer on press-down (which I don't know how to disable -- I think it may be impossible to disable, but proving a negative is hard;-).
So, you need more work, and a non-"neat" solution: on the button-down event's callback, bind the enter and leave events (to bound methods of a class instance where you can track whether the mouse is currently inside or inside the widget of interest) of that window as well as the button-release; this way, when the release event comes, you know whether to perform the "actual application callback" (if inside) or do nothing (if outside) -- that gives you your desire number 2, but describing this as neat would be a stretch.
Desire number 1 is even harder, because you have to track enter and leave events on EVERY widget of interest -- it's not enough to know one bit, whether the mouse is inside or outside, but rather you must keep track of which widget (if any) it's currently in, to direct the "actual application callback" properly (if at all) at button release time.
While the internals aren't going to be neat, each functionality can be bound into one neat-to-call function... with slightly "indaginous" internals (a term that's used more often to refer to root canal work or the like, rather than programming, but may be appropriate when you're wanting to go against the grain of functionality hard-coded in a framework... that's the downside of frameworks -- you're in clover as long as you want to behave in ways they support, but when you want to defeat their usual behaviors to do something completely different, that can hardly ever be "neat"!-).
The tkinter documentation does provide you info on that:
http://www.pythonware.com/library/tkinter/introduction/events-and-bindings.htm
You can do a binding on
<ButtonRelease-1>
Binding on ButtonRelease-1 isn't enough. The callback won't fire until the button is released, but it doesn't matter where the mouse is when it's released. What governs is where the mouse was when it was clicked, as Alex Martelli's said. An easy way to get the desired behavior is to put everything on a canvas, and bind the callback to ButtonRelease-1. Now you have something like
def callback(event):
x1, y1, x2, y2 = canvas.bbox(widget)
if x1 <= event.x <= x2 and y1 <= event.y <= y2:
<whatever>
I've used this approach in my own code to get arbitrary widgets to behave like buttons in this respect.

Change the focus from one Text widget to another

I'm new to Python and I'm trying to create a simple GUI using Tkinter.
So often in many user interfaces, hitting the tab button will change the focus from one Text widget to another. Whenever I'm in a Text widget, tab only indents the text cursor.
Does anyone know if this is configurable?
This is very easy to do with Tkinter.
There are a couple of things that have to happen to make this work. First, you need to make sure that the standard behavior doesn't happen. That is, you don't want tab to both insert a tab and move focus to the next widget. By default events are processed by a specific widget prior to where the standard behavior occurs (typically in class bindings). Tk has a simple built-in mechanism to stop events from further processing.
Second, you need to make sure you send focus to the appropriate widget. There is built-in support for determining what the next widget is.
For example:
def focus_next_window(event):
event.widget.tk_focusNext().focus()
return("break")
text_widget=Text(...)
text_widget.bind("<Tab>", focus_next_window)
Important points about this code:
The method tk_focusNext() returns the next widget in the keyboard traversal hierarchy.
the method focus() sets the focus to that widget
returning "break" is critical in that it prevents the class binding from firing. It is this class binding that inserts the tab character, which you don't want.
If you want this behavior for all text widgets in an application you can use the bind_class() method instead of bind() to make this binding affect all text widgets.
You can also have the binding send focus to a very specific widget but I recommend sticking with the default traversal order, then make sure the traversal order is correct.
It is really simple in PyQt4 simply use this one single line below and you will be able to change focus by pressing tab button:
self.textEdit.setTabChangesFocus(True)
The focus traversal is somewhat customizable, usually letting the X windows manager handle it (with focus follows mouse, or click). According to the manual it should be possible to bind an event to the key press event, for tab presses, and triggering a focusNext event in those cases.

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