CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonuser-interfacetkinter
Matt
Matt

Reputation: 119

Tkinter active fill by tag

I'm designing a GUI application using Tkinter and for this project, I need buttons for the menu. While looking into the buttons I wasn't blown away by the customization options that come with the buttons, especially when I found out that you can bind click arguments to rectangles.

This allows me to customize the "button" in (almost) limitless ways, but to allow me to put text on the button I need to create a rectangle element and a text element and bind them together using Tkinter's tag_bind property.

One of the design properties of the button that I wanted was active fill when the user moused over the element. Right now I'm just using activefill="" which works, except the text element and the button element will only fill while the mouse is over that element. So, for example, when I mouse over the button the button excluding the text will highlight and vise versa when I mouse over the text.

Below is a simplified (for brevity) version of what I use to generate the buttons;

button = canvas.create_rectangle(button_width, button_height, 10, 10, fill="000", activefill="111", tags="test")
text = canvas.create_text((button_width/2), (button_height/2), activefill="111", tags="test")
canvas.tag_bind("test", "<Button-1>", "foo")

Is there a way to bind the active fill function to a tag rather than a specific element?

Another option is that I completely missed a bunch of information about customizing the buttons in Tkinter, and I would not be apposed to learning about that.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1319

Answers (1)

David Duran
David Duran

Reputation: 1826

Option 1

I would personally not go for the presented solution. I do not know if you are using the button provided by tk or ttk. But, with the tkinter.tk, you could absolutely change the appearance of the button.

Following, I give you an example that produces a button with the following characteristics:

  • Blue foreground
  • Flat appearance
  • When hovered, the background is green
  • When pressed, the background is red

The code is as follows:

import tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()

# Function hovering
def on_enter(e):
    btn['background'] = 'green'

def on_leave(e):
    btn['background'] = 'white'

# Create the button
btn = tk.Button(root, background='white', activebackground='red', foreground='blue',relief='flat',text='Test',width=20)
btn.pack()

# Bindings
btn.bind("<Enter>", on_enter)
btn.bind("<Leave>", on_leave)

# Loop
root.mainloop()

Option 2

If even after having tried the tk.Button, you are not glad with the result, I would create a Frame containing a Label (you can do nearly anything with that combination). Then, you could change the background of the frame according to any user action, like:

import tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()

# Function hovering
def on_enter(e):
    lab['background'] = 'green'

def on_leave(e):
    lab['background'] = 'white'

# Click
def on_click(e):
    print("hi")

# Create the frame with a label inside
fr = tk.Frame(root)
lab = tk.Label(fr, text="Test", width=20, background="white")

# Packing
fr.pack()
lab.pack()

# Bindings
fr.bind("<Enter>", on_enter)
fr.bind("<Leave>", on_leave)
lab.bind("<Button-1>", on_click)

# Loop
root.mainloop()

You could even create a class with the above combination.

Upvotes: 2

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