Tooltips when hovering over a PyGTK TreeView column header
If you search for information about showing tooltips in a PyGTK TreeView, most of what you find is about tooltips for hovering over rows. Here, I'll explain how to show a tooltip when you hover over a column header in a PyGTK TreeView.
GTK+ has this nice tooltips class which generally works by doing something like this:
tooltips = gtk.Tooltips()
tooltips.set_tip(widget, 'TOOLTIP TEXT')
Then, when your mouse hovers over the widget
, TOOLTIP TEXT will appear in a tooltip. But for TreeView columns, there is a slight complication: what is the widget? Well, you have to do something like this:
tooltips = gtk.Tooltips()
column = gtk.TreeViewColumn()
column_header = gtk.Label('Column Header')
column_header.show()
column.set_widget(column_header)
tooltips.set_tip(column_header, 'TOOLTIP TEXT')
This code is a bit ugly, as normally you would just do column = gtk.TreeViewColumn('Column Header')
without making a separate gtk.Label
. But, if you do it that way, then (as far as I can tell) there is no way to get the label widget, and thus no way to set a tooltip.
Here is an example that you can run. This is based on the basictreeview.py example from the PyGTK Tutorial.
#!/usr/bin/env python
# example basictreeview.py
import pygtk
pygtk.require('2.0')
import gtk
class BasicTreeViewExample:
# close the window and quit
def delete_event(self, widget, event, data=None):
gtk.main_quit()
return False
def __init__(self):
# Create a new window
self.window = gtk.Window(gtk.WINDOW_TOPLEVEL)
self.window.set_title("Basic TreeView Example")
self.window.set_size_request(200, 200)
self.window.connect("delete_event", self.delete_event)
# create a TreeStore with one string column to use as the model
self.treestore = gtk.TreeStore(str)
# we'll add some data now - 4 rows with 3 child rows each
for parent in range(4):
piter = self.treestore.append(None, ['parent %i' % parent])
for child in range(3):
self.treestore.append(piter, ['child %i of parent %i' %
(child, parent)])
# create the TreeView using treestore
self.treeview = gtk.TreeView(self.treestore)
# create the TreeViewColumn to display the data
tooltips = gtk.Tooltips()
self.tvcolumn = gtk.TreeViewColumn()
column_header = gtk.Label('Column 0')
column_header.show()
self.tvcolumn.set_widget(column_header)
tooltips.set_tip(column_header, 'TOOLTIP TEXT')
# add tvcolumn to treeview
self.treeview.append_column(self.tvcolumn)
# create a CellRendererText to render the data
self.cell = gtk.CellRendererText()
# add the cell to the tvcolumn and allow it to expand
self.tvcolumn.pack_start(self.cell, True)
# set the cell "text" attribute to column 0 - retrieve text
# from that column in treestore
self.tvcolumn.add_attribute(self.cell, 'text', 0)
# make it searchable
self.treeview.set_search_column(0)
# Allow sorting on the column
self.tvcolumn.set_sort_column_id(0)
# Allow drag and drop reordering of rows
self.treeview.set_reorderable(True)
self.window.add(self.treeview)
self.window.show_all()
def main():
gtk.main()
if __name__ == "__main__":
tvexample = BasicTreeViewExample()
main()
If you're setting the tooltip in a different place in your code than right where you set the header text (i.e., if the label widget is not accessible), you can use the get_widget
method on the column to get the label widget.
How about a tutorial showing how to use gtk3 with css, which is the main feature of gtk3.
Comment by craig — January 7, 2012 @ 6:49 pm
In the meanwhile you can use widget.set_tooltip_text(aString) for setting a tooltip text for all widgets, as it inherits from class gtk.Widget:
column = gtk.TreeViewColumn()
column_header = gtk.Label(‘Column Header')
column_header.set_tooltip_text(‘TOOLTIP TEXT')
column_header.show()
column.set_widget(column_header)
Comment by Chris X. — April 2, 2012 @ 4:52 pm