CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonbuttonuser-interfacetkinter
jjcastil
jjcastil

Reputation: 199

Disabling a button but visually keeping it as if it wasn't disabled

for my board game, I need to press a certain button and after that, disable it (to prevent the user or the computer to place a "peace" in the same place). The problem I have with this is basically design-wise: as you would know, when a button is disabled in tkinter, it turns grayed-out, kinda "visually blocking" the piece I placed... Here is an image of what I'm talking about:

enter image description here

My question is, how would I disable a button, but keep it as if it wasn't disabled? I searched and the only answer I came about was basically getting rid of the button and replacing it with an image... If that's my best bet, how would I do this? the grid is created with a for loop that fills a list with buttons, and then displays them into a frame using the grid() method. This would look like:

enter image description here

Is there another way to achieve this with tkinter methods? I would rather not change the buttons to an image with a bound event, that seems too complicated given that I'd have to mess with my loop. Thanks!!

Thanks!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 3406

Answers (2)

Bryan Oakley
Bryan Oakley

Reputation: 385940

You can control the foreground and background colors with a variety of options, such as foreground, background, disabledforeground, and highlightbackground. Have you tried setting any of those to get the visual behavior you want?

You also have the option of disabling the callback, so the button will press but it won't do anything. To disable it, simply configure the command option to be None:

the_button.configure(command=None)

Upvotes: 3

jjcastil
jjcastil

Reputation: 199

Turns out in order to disable the button but keeping its appearance, you have to disable its callback to make it "unresponsive" (as stated by @Bryan Oakley and @martineau, thanks!) and also change its 'relief' as to make it stay "fixed" (it kind of shifts into the bottom right corner, but that's good enough).

Imagine you have this generic button:

button = tkinter.Button(frame, height=0, bg='blue',\
                    activebackground='blue',width = 0, text = " ", image = self.blank, \
                    command=lambda row=row_index, \
                        column=column_index: \
                        self.button_clicked(row,column))

Now when you want to disable it but keeping its original appearance, you change the following attributes of the button:

button['command'] = 0 #this disables the callback
button['relief'] = 'sunken' #makes the button fixed

As easy as that! thanks!

Upvotes: 2

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