File browser for tkinter using idle GUI library (Python)

2017-04-03T13:37:34-07:00

Python recipe 580772 by Miguel Martínez López (browser, file, idlelib, tkinter).

Idle is installed by default on windows.

For Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Debian run:

  sudo apt-get install idle-python2.7

A tree structure is drawn on a Tkinter Canvas object. A tree item is an object with an icon and a text. The item maybe be expandable and/or editable. A tree item has two kind of icons: A normal icon and an icon when the item is selected. To create the tree structure, it's necessary to create a link between tree items, using a parent-child relationship.

The canvas is built using a idlelib.TreeWidget.ScrolledCanvas class. The frame attribute of this object contains a Frame Tkinter widget prepared for scrolling. This frame allocates a Tkinter Canvas and Tkinter Scrollbars. This is the signature:

   ScrolledCanvas(master, **options_for_the_tkinter_canvas)

It accepts exactly the same arguments than a Canvas widget.

A tree item should be a subclass of idlelib.TreeWidget.TreeItem.

The parent-child relationship between tree items is established using the idlelib.TreeWidget.TreeNode class.

This is the signature for TreeNode(canvas, parent, item):

canvas should be a ScrolledCanvas instance.
parent should be the parent item. Leave that to None to create a root node.
item should be the child item

FileTreeItem is a type of TreeItem. The only argument of a file tree item is a path.

Here there is an example of a custom tree item:

https://code.activestate.com/recipes/579077-bookmarks-browser-for-firefox/

To create your own tree items, it's required to subclass TreeItem. These are the methods that should be overrided:

GetText: It should return the text string to display.
GetLabelText: It should return label text string to display in front of text (Optional).
IsExpandable: It should return a boolean indicating whether the istem is expandable
IsEditable: It should return a boolean indicating whether the item's text may be edited.
SetText: Get the text to change if the item is is editable
GetIconName: Return name of icon to be displayed normally (Icons should be included in ICONDIR directory)
GetSelectedIconName: Return name of icon to be displayed when selected (Icons should be included in ICONDIR directory).
GetSubList: It should return a list of child items (Optional. If not defined, the element is not expandable)
OnDoubleClick: Called on a double-click on the item. (Optional)

Icons should be included in "Icons" subdirectory of path to idlelib library. If you want to use other path, just change ICONDIR variable to path to your icons:

 import idlelib
 idlelib.ICONDIR = "Your path to your icons"

Run this to find the path to idlelib module:

 python -c "import idlelib; print(idlelib.__file__)"

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