How to specify a full click in Python Tkinter - python

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.

Related

Python 3 - Is there a way to keep the mouse inside the tkinter window

Python 3
Tkinter
Hey, I'm looking for something that don't allow the user to leave a window if a variable is true/false.
basicly, somethings that keeps the mouse inside the tkinter window
Not directly, no. However you could monitor the mouse position with the <Motion> event and correct it every time it goes outside. How to correct it would depend on your OS; look into pyautogui for a crossplatform solution.
You can't force the mouse to stay in the window, though you can "grab" all of the mouse events, preventing the user from clicking anywhere but on your app. This is very dangerous as you can lock up your computer if your code has a bug in it.
See How can I make area outside toplevel unclickable?

How to simulate button presses in pyside?

What I'm trying to do:
I have a Python(PySide) and Qt/QML UI that today responds to keyboard input (actually it's an IR remote control, but the input events are received as though they were coming from a keyboard).
I want to be able to also respond to mouse events. So where today the user uses arrow keys to navigate to a particular button and presses OK (i.e., Return) to activate the handling for that button, I would like them to just be able to click the mouse on that button and get the same handling behavior.
What I have so far:
I've already got Keys.onReturnPressed: handling in my QML code that does what I need to do when the user presses OK/Return. And I've added MouseArea { ... onClicked: {...} ... } QML code that recognizes when I click on a given control. So I already see in my log when the mouse click events occur.
My question:
How do I tie them together? I want to make the onClicked: behavior just generate some kind of event (a signal, maybe?) that causes the onReturnPressed: handling to be invoked. (I'm not at all averse to passing events through the Python side of things if that's what it takes to make this work.)
(I guess I should mention here that the existing code includes some base classes (is that the right terminology here?) that can define behavior across ALL controls of a certain type (e.g., Buttons) in the system. So while each of the many, many Buttons has its own onReturnPressed: code providing its unique handling, my objective is to have a single onClicked: handler in the base class that makes all Buttons respond to clicks as they do to Return presses today.)
Can anyone point me in the right direction?
BTW: Yes, I'm aware that there's a second problem here, too, of navigation. That is, even once I've turned the mouse click into a press
of the Return key, I still have to solve the problem of associating it
with the right control on the screen.
I sort of didn't want to muddy the waters by asking too many things at once.
I'll get to that one
when I've got this one in hand. (...unless you've got a simple solution already up your sleeve... In that case I'm all ears.)

Avoid event grab during motion in Tkinter

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)

Checking user idle in PyQt by examining mouse clicks on the GUI

I am trying to implement a feature such that if the user havn't interact with the GUI for some time X, I will stop some functionality of the GUI.
Currently I have a time stamp set up so that if any of the button is not clicked in X seconds, the GUI will terminate some functionality
button1.triggered.connect(keep_alive)
button2.triggered.connect(keep_alive)
....
buttonN.triggered.connect(keep_alive)
As you can see, this is not really elegant, and doesn't scale as the button increases. Therefore I am currently investigating another method such that I monitor the mouse clicks
mouse = app.mouseButtons()
if mouse != Qtcore.Qt.NoButton:
#keep_alive
I think this is a little hacky, but it will work for the functionality I envisioned, however, I do not know how to insert this to the execution loop of the QT.
Any suggestions will be appreciated
You must intercept the mouse events by reimplementing the mousePressEvent.
http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qwidget.html#mousePressEvent
To make sure that it won't affect your other functionalities you'll need to propagate it to the parent widget. Read more details: https://www.qt.io/blog/2006/05/27/mouse-event-propagation
I would proceed by implementing it in the main window and make sure all mouse events are propagated to it.

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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