Selection in Tkinter Text widget.

[Ant]

Hi all,

I have been trying to select text in a Text widget programmatically. I
have been trying the following minimal example:
#=================================
from Tkinter import *

def showgui():
win = Tk()

area = Text(win, width = 50, height = 20)
area.pack()

new = """Lots of text here
and here
and here..."""
area.insert("1.0", new)

area.tag_add(SEL, "1.0", END)

win.mainloop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
showgui()
#==================================

The area.tag_add(...) line should - from what I have read in Frederik's
Intro to Tkinter guide - select all of the text in the text area. It
doesn't however...

Does anyone have any idea how to get this to work? Or tell me what I am
doing wrong.

Cheers,

 

[Fredrik Lundh]

I have been trying to select text in a Text widget programmatically. I
have been trying the following minimal example:
#=================================
from Tkinter import *

def showgui():
win = Tk()

area = Text(win, width = 50, height = 20)
area.pack()

new = """Lots of text here
and here
and here..."""
area.insert("1.0", new)

area.tag_add(SEL, "1.0", END)

area.focus_set()

win.mainloop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
showgui()
#==================================

The area.tag_add(...) line should - from what I have read in Frederik's
Intro to Tkinter guide - select all of the text in the text area. It
doesn't however...

it does, but by default, the selection is only shown for widgets that has the key-
board focus. if you add an explicit focus_set() call, you'll see the selection.

</F>

 

[Ant]

Fredrik Lundh wrote:
....

it does, but by default, the selection is only shown for widgets that has the key-
board focus. if you add an explicit focus_set() call, you'll see the selection.

</F>

Perfect! Thanks Fredrik.

Strange behaviour though (IMHO), that the selection is only shown if
the widget has focus. I just tried adding another component to the
test, and switching from widget to widget does indeed stop the
selection showing!

Cheers,

 

[greg]

Strange behaviour though (IMHO), that the selection is only shown if
the widget has focus.

It's only strange if you're used to certain platforms.
This is normal behaviour in the Macintosh world. One
of the original Apple UI Guidelines was that there
should only be one selection visible at a time, so
that it's always clear what you're operating on.

(They seem to be breaking that now in MacOSX, which
I think is a backward step...)