Tkinter: populating Mac Help menu?

[Edward K. Ream]

Hello all,



Creating a 'Help' menu 'by hand' on the Mac does not work, or rather, it
creates a *second* Help menu.



There are hints about how to do this at:



http://tkinter.unpythonic.net/wiki/Widgets/Menu



but so far those hints have not been enough The following statements are
the result of several happy hours experimenting with dir(obj) for several
objects obj related to menus. (Jeeze, I love Python, but you knew that



The url above suggests that the 'official' Mac menu is named x.help, where x
is the Tk name (a string) of the menubar. If menubar is the Tkinter menubar
widget, then I assume that x = menubar._w.



So given x (a string), how does one create a widget whose name is '%s.help'
% x ? This is a can of corn in Tk, but nothing comes to mind looking at the
Tkinter source code.



If my app does *not* create a help menu, then even long after the Mac
menubar is created, and the official (empty) Help menu is visible,
menubar.children does *not* contain an entry for the official Mac Help menu.
Thus, there appears to be no way to populate the official Help menu after
letting Tkinter create the Help menu. Naturally, I could be wrong



Thanks for any help you can provide.


Edward

 

[Alexander Schliep]

Creating a 'Help' menu 'by hand' on the Mac does not work, or
rather, it creates a *second* Help menu.

Presuming you are talking about MacOS X, it doesn't for me.
See Gato from http://gato.sourceforge.net/Download/

The menu code is at <http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gato/
trunk/Gato/Gato.py?revision=275&view=markup>

Alexander

 

[Eric Brunel]

[snip]

So given x (a string), how does one create a widget whose name is
'%s.help'
% x ? This is a can of corn in Tk, but nothing comes to mind looking at
the
Tkinter source code.

Use the 'name' keyword when creating the menu itself:

----------------------------------------------------
from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()

mb = Menu(root)
root.configure(menu=mb)

## Normal menu
fm = Menu(mb)
fm.add_command(label='Quit', command=root.quit)
mb.add_cascade(label='File', menu=fm)

## Help menu with a specific name
hm = Menu(mb, name='help')
hm.add_command(label='About...')
mb.add_cascade(label='Help', menu=hm)

root.mainloop()
----------------------------------------------------

I didn't test it on MacOS-X, but the same trick should be used when
creating help menus on Unix (this menu is supposed to appear at the right
of the menubar according to Motif conventions).

HTH

 

[Edward K. Ream]

Thanks for these replies. I'll try these ideas soon and report back on my
experiences.

Edward

 

[Edward K. Ream]

hm = Menu(mb, name='help')

Yes, that worked. Many thanks for your help with Help.

Edward