swe9 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a global mode for my program that may be on or off. I would like to manage and indicate the state from the top level of the (Tk 8.0 style) menubar. I tried putting a checkbutton into the menubar and it sets its variable appropriately. However, it does *not* show its state :-(

For the moment, I've used a cascade that then includes a checkbutton to show the state. Perhaps a checkbutton in the menubar is inelegant, but this seems even worse...

Is there a better or "right" way to handle a global state indicator like this? I would be happy enough if the menubar allowed the checkbox to show up to indicate the state.

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Re: Menubar checkbutton to show state?
by stefbv (Priest) on Aug 19, 2010 at 06:35 UTC

    I assume you use Perl Tk, in this case you can use a Tk::StatusBar widget for the task.

    Here is a tiny patch to fix a problem, I encountered, regarding 'systembuttonface':

    --- lib/Tk/StatusBar.pm    2004-02-05 05:21:14.000000000 +0200
+++ lib/Tk/StatusBar.pm.new    2010-03-29 12:58:51.164978272 +0300
@@ -147,7 +147,6 @@
     my $n = $self->ProgressBar(
         -borderwidth    => $borderwidth,
         -width          => 17,
-        -troughcolor    => 'systembuttonface',
         %args,
     );

    [download]

    Update: How would I do it: :)

    use strict;
use warnings;

use Tk;
use Tk::StatusBar;
use Tk::ToolBar;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->geometry('200x80+10+20');
$mw->optionAdd('*Label.font' => '{MS Sans Serif} 8');

my $tb = $mw->ToolBar(qw/-movable 1 -side top/);

my $connected = 1;

$tb->ToolButton(
    -image   => 'actreload16',
    -tip     => 'back',
    -command => \&toggle_conn,
);

my $sb = $mw->StatusBar();

my $txtstatus = $sb->addLabel( -relief => 'flat' );

my $icostatus = $sb->addLabel(
    -width  => 20,
    -relief => 'raised',
    -anchor => 'center',
    -side   => 'right'
);

toggle_conn();

MainLoop();

sub toggle_conn {

    if ($connected) {
        $connected = 0;
        my $text = 'Disconnected';
        $icostatus->configure( -image => 'connectno16' );
        $txtstatus->configure(
            -foreground   => 'darkred',
            -textvariable => \$text,
        );
    }
    else {
        $connected = 1;
        my $text = 'Connected';
        $icostatus->configure( -image => 'connectyes16' );
        $txtstatus->configure(
            -foreground   => 'darkgreen',
            -textvariable => \$text,
        );
    }
}

    [download]

    Regards, Stefan

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Re: Menubar checkbutton to show state?
by zentara (Cardinal) on Aug 19, 2010 at 13:14 UTC
    To be honest, Tk is not very good at accessing the window manager's statusbar, but Gtk2 is. The example below, is a Tk program, which you can place wherever you want as an indicator. For Gtk2, see Gtk2::StatusIcon Demo ( which may not work on all WindowManagers :-( ) 
    #!/usr/bin/perl
use Tk;
use strict;

my $mw = MainWindow->new;
$mw->geometry('20x20-20-20');
$mw->overrideredirect(1);

# make right mouse button click an exit
$mw->bind( '<3>' => sub{ exit  } );

my @color = qw/red lightgray/;
my $bits = pack("b8"x8,
"...11...",
"..1111..",
".111111.",
"11111111",
"11111111",
".111111.",
"..1111..",
"...11...",);

$mw->DefineBitmap('indicator' => 8,8, $bits);

my $label = $mw->Label(-bitmap=>'indicator', -fg=>'red', -bg => 'black
+')
   ->pack( -fill=>'both', -expand=>1);

$mw->repeat(500,sub{$label->configure(
                               -fg=>$color[0]);
                               @color=reverse(@color);
 });

MainLoop;

    [download]
    I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth.
    Old Perl Programmer Haiku
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thanks for the responses! I'll have to try things out and see if I can make it work.
[reply]

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