Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello monks

Is there a way to set a horizontal padding to the items inserted in a ListBox? I want the item text to be some pixel away from the border of the ListBox container. I couldn't find any option to do this ($listbox->itemconfigure is limited to a couple of options). Thank you for any suggestion.

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Re: Tk Listbox item padx
by choroba (Cardinal) on Apr 09, 2020 at 00:06 UTC
    If you don't want to prepend a space to each element in the list, use a more advanced type of a list. For example, a Tk::HList: 
    #! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use Tk;
use Tk::HList;

my $mw = 'MainWindow'->new(-title => 'Listbox test');
my $hl = $mw->HList(-drawbranch => 0,
                    -pady       => 0,
                    -padx       => 10  # <- This is what you need!
)->pack;

for ('A' .. 'H') {
    $hl->addchild("", -text => $_);

}

MainLoop();

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    map{substr$_->[0],$_->[1]||0,1}[\*||{},3],[[]],[ref qr-1,-,-1],[{}],[sub{}^*ARGV,3]
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      Thanks, choroba, for pointing me to the HList widget. The behaviour was exactly what I was loking for.

      2020-04-10 Athanasius s/Corion/choroba/.

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Re: Tk Listbox item padx
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Apr 09, 2020 at 01:07 UTC

    Not quite sure just what you want, but maybe investigate  -ipadx -ipady for internal padding, whereas  -padx -pady pad the exterior of a widget.

    Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

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      G'day AnomalousMonk,

      I don't know which widget you were thinking of. You didn't specify anything different from the Tk::Listbox widget that the OP asked about. That widget does not support any of the options you suggested. Here's two of them; the other two failed with similar messages. 

      $ perl -e 'use Tk; my $mw = tkinit; $mw->Listbox(-ipadx => 1)->pack; M
+ainLoop'
unknown option "-ipadx" at /long/path/to/Tk/Widget.pm line 205.
 at -e line 1.

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      $ perl -e 'use Tk; my $mw = tkinit; $mw->Listbox(-padx => 1)->pack; Ma
+inLoop'
unknown option "-padx" at /long/path/to/Tk/Widget.pm line 205.
 at -e line 1.

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      And purely as a test control, this worked: 

      $ perl -e 'use Tk; my $mw = tkinit; $mw->Listbox()->pack; MainLoop'

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      — Ken

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        It was the mention of  padx in the OP title that brought  -ipadx -ipady to mind. These are pack options, but apparently  -ipadx doesn't do quite what I imagined; this 

        c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Tk;
 ;;
 my $mw = tkinit;
 ;;
 my $lb = $mw->Listbox->pack(-ipadx => 10);
 $lb->insert('end', $_) for 'four score and', 'seven years ago', 'our 
+fathers';
 ;;
 MainLoop
"

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        does not produce the left-hand border/indent I expected. Oh, well...

        Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

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