Tag Archives: wxPython

wxPython: Set Which Display the Frame is on

GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

The other day, I saw an interesting question in the wxPython IRC channel. They were asking if there was a way to set which display their application would appear on. Robin Dunn, the creator of wxPython, gave the questioner some pointers, but I decided to go ahead and write up a quick tutorial on the topic.

The wxPython toolkit actually has all the bits and pieces you need for this sort of thing. The first step is getting the combined screen size. What I mean by this is asking wxPython what it thinks is the total size of the screen. This would be the total width and height of all your displays combined. You can get this by calling wx.DisplaySize(), which returns a tuple. If you would like to get individual display resolutions, then you have to call wx.Display and pass in the index of the display. So if you have two displays, then the first display’s resolution could be acquired like this:

index = 0
display = wx.Display(index)
geo = display.GetGeometry()

Let’s write up a quick little application that has a single button that will just switch which display the application is on. Continue reading wxPython: Set Which Display the Frame is on →

How to Use wxPython Demo Code Outside the Demo

Cross-Platform, GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

Every now and then, someone will ask about how they can run the demo code from wxPython’s demo outside of the demo. In other words, they wonder how you can extract the code from the demo and run it in your own. I think I wrote about this very topic quite some time ago on the wxPython wiki, but I thought I should write on the topic here as well.

What to do about the log

The first issue that I always see is that the demo code is riddled with calls to some kind of log. It’s always writing to that log to help the developer see how different events get fired or how different methods get called. This is all well and good, but it makes just copying the code out of the demo difficult. Let’s take the code from the wx.ListBox demo as an example and see if we can make it work outside of the demo. Here is the demo code: Continue reading How to Use wxPython Demo Code Outside the Demo →

wxPython Recipes Book Contest

Books, GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

I recently had my self-published book, “wxPython Cookbook” picked up by Apress and republished as wxPython Recipes. Since they gave me a few complimentary paperback copies, I have decided to do a little contest.

Rules

  • Post a comment telling me why you would want a copy
  • The most clever or heartfelt commenter will be chosen by me

The contest will run starting now until Monday, January 15th @ 11:59 p.m. CST.

The winner will be contacted by yours truly and I will sign the book and ship it wherever you want me to.

For those of you who want to purchase the book, Apress gave me a lame 20% off coupon that you can use for either the eBook or Paperback on their website: wx20

wxPython Recipes Book Release

GUI Toolkits, Python, Python 3, wxPython,

I was contacted earlier this year by Apress about republishing my book, wxPython Cookbook, under their branding. I thought it might be fun to see what I could learn from a publisher so I went with them as I have enjoyed several of their books in the past. The biggest change to the book is that I ended up grouping recipes into chapters instead of having each recipe be a stand-alone chapter. I also added a few new recipes to help fill in when some chapters weren’t easily sorted into groups.

Anyway, Apress just released the book in the past couple of days:

You can find the book over on Amazon or on the Apress website. You can also see a preview of the book on Google.

You can get 20% off of the book from Apress by using the following code: wx20. This code is good on the paperback and the eBook versions of the book until June 2018.

The code for the book is hosted on Apress’s Github account. I also host a copy on Github.

Regardless, feel free to check it out. If you already bought a copy of the wxPython Cookbook, then you don’t need to get this one too since it’s basically the same thing with a bit more polish and a handful of new recipes. I have plans for some other books that I will be self-publishing hopefully in 2018, so keep an eye on the blog for news about that!

wxPython: Moving items in ObjectListView

Python, wxPython,

I was recently asked about how to implement drag-and-drop of items in a wx.ListCtrl or in ObjectListView. Unfortunately neither control has this built-in although I did find an article on the wxPython wiki that demonstrated one way to do drag-and-drop of the items in a ListCtrl.

However I did think that implementing some buttons to move items around in an ObjectListView widget should be fairly easy to implement. So that’s what this article will be focusing on.

Changing Item Order

If you don’t have wxPython and ObjectListView installed, then you will want to use pip to install them:

pip install wxPython objectlistview

Once that is done, open up your favorite text editor or IDE and enter the following code: Continue reading wxPython: Moving items in ObjectListView →

wxPython: Drag and Drop an Image onto Your Application

GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

I recently came across a question on StackOverflow where the user wanted to know how to drag images onto their image control in wxPython and have the dragged image resize into a thumbnail. This piqued my interest and I decided to figure out how to do it.

I knew that you could create a thumbnail in Python using the Pillow package. So if you’d like to follow along you will need to install Pillow and wxPython with pip:

pip install Pillow wxPython

Now that we have the latest versions of the packages we need, we can write some code. Let’s take a look: Continue reading wxPython: Drag and Drop an Image onto Your Application →

wxPython: All About Accelerators

GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

The wxPython toolkit supports using keyboard shortcuts via the concept of Accelerators and Accelerator Tables. You can also bind directly to key presses, but in a lot of cases, you will want to go with Accelerators. The accelerator gives to the ability to add a keyboard shortcut to your application, such as the ubiquitous “CTRL+S” that most applications use for saving a file. As long as your application has focus, this keyboard shortcut can be added trivially.

Note that you will normally add an accelerator table to your wx.Frame instance. If you happen to have multiple frames in your application, then you may need to add an accelerator table to multiple frames depending on your design.

Let’s take a look at a simple example: Continue reading wxPython: All About Accelerators →

wxPython – Getting Data From All Columns in a ListCtrl

GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

Every now and then, I see someone asking how to get the text for each item in a row of a ListCtrl in report mode. The ListCtrl does not make it very obvious how you would get the text in row one, column three for example. In this article we will look at how we might accomplish this task.

Getting Data from Any Column

Let’s start by creating a simple ListCtrl and using a button to populate it. Then we’ll add a second button for extracting the contents of the ListCtrl: Continue reading wxPython – Getting Data From All Columns in a ListCtrl →

ANN: Boomslang XML

Cross-Platform, Python, wxPython,

I recently decided to start putting together some fun example desktop applications using Python. I’ve been using wxPython to create the cross platform applications. My first one is called Boomslang XML and is a basic XML editor.

The name, Boomslang, comes from a large venomous snake. It’s name basically means “tree snake”, which I thought was appropriate since the user interface uses a tree widget to represent the structure of the XML document.

The current features in Boomslang include the following:

  • Opening / Editing multiple XML files
  • Auto save on edit of the XML
  • Recent file support
  • Some keyboard shortcuts (accelerators)
  • Add new XML nodes or attributes
  • Edit nodes and attributes
  • Delete nodes

Currently this is fairly beta, but I thought other people might find it interesting. I am aware of a couple of issues with it currently, such as the inability to delete attributes or not being able to add an XML node with spaces in it But I will get those fixed soon. In the meantime, feel free to check out the project over on Github.

Note: This project was tested with Python 2 and 3, wxPython 2.9, 3.0, and 4.0 using the lxml package on Windows 7, Xubuntu 16.04 and Mac OSX Sierra.

wxPython: Working with Status Bars

Cross-Platform, GUI Toolkits, Python, wxPython,

Most applications come with the Status Bar. The status bar is the widget along the bottom of most applications that you use every day. They give you information about what line you’re editing in a text editor or when you last saved. In wxPython, you can add a status bar to your frame by using the wx.StatusBar class. In this article, we will learn all about how to use status bars in wxPython.

No Status Bars

It’s always good to start at the beginning. So we will begin our journey by looking at some sample code that shows what a frame looks like without a status bar:

import wx
 
class MainFrame(wx.Frame):
 
    def __init__(self):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, title='No Statusbars')
 
        panel = wx.Panel(self)
 
        self.Show()
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    app = wx.App(False)
    frame = MainFrame()
    app.MainLoop()

When you run this code, you should see something like the following:

Continue reading wxPython: Working with Status Bars →