Actions
Creating tool items, GLib.Actions, and keyboard shortcuts
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Creating tool items, GLib.Actions, and keyboard shortcuts
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GTK and GLib have a powerful API called which can be used to define the primary actions of your app, assign them keyboard shortcuts, use them as entry points for your app and tie them to widgets like Buttons and Menu Items. In this section, we're going to create a Quit action for your app with an assigned keyboard shortcut and a Button that shows that shortcut in a tooltip.
Since we're using this HeaderBar as our app's main titlebar, we need to set show_title_buttons
to true
so that GTK knows to include window controls. We can then override our Window's built-in titlebar with the titlebar
property.
Build and run your app. You can see that it now has a custom HeaderBar with a big red icon in it. But when you click on it, nothing happens.
Define a new Quit action and register it with Application
from inside the startup
method:
You'll notice that we do a few things here:
Set the "accelerators" (keyboard shortcuts) for "app.quit" to <Control>q
and <Control>w
. Notice that the action name is prefixed with app
; this refers to the namespace of the ActionMap
built in to Gtk.Application
Now we can tie the action to the HeaderBar Button by assigning the action_name
property of our Button:
Build and run your app again and see that you can now quit the app either through the defined keyboard shortcuts or by clicking the Button in the HeaderBar.
First, make sure you've included Granite in the build dependencies declared in your meson.build
file, then set the tooltip_markup
property of your HeaderBar Button:
Build and run your app and then hover over the HeaderBar Button to see its description and associated keyboard shortcuts.
Begin by creating a Gtk.Application
with a Gtk.ApplicationWindow
as you've done in . Once you have that set up, let's create a new . Typically your app will have a HeaderBar, at the top of the window, which will contain tool items that users will interact with to trigger your app's actions.
Now, create a new with a big colorful icon and add it to the HeaderBar:
elementary OS ships with a large set of system icons that you can use in your app for actions, status, and more. You can browse the full set of named icons using the app, available in AppCenter.
Instantiate a new with the name "quit"
Add the action to our Gtk.Application
's
Connect the activate
signal of our SimpleAction
to Application's function.
Accelerator strings follow a format defined by . You can find a list of key values
Actions defined like this, and registered with Application, can be used as entry points into the app. You can find out more about this integration in .
You may have noticed that in elementary apps you can hover your pointer over tool items to see a description of the button and any available keyboard shortcuts associated with it. We can add the same thing to our Button with .
If you're having trouble, you can view the full example code . You can also learn more from GLib.Action
.