How to disable the default context menu of pyqtgraph?

Question

Can anyone help me to disable the context menu of pyqtgraph or remove some options from it?

Answer 1

I've been working on this myself and this is what I've found (as of May 2021). For reference, the image below is the right click menu that appears for the PyQtGraph PlotWidget, but not all of the items (QActions) are added by the PlotWidget itself.

• The menu items above the separator are created by the ViewBox menu (source code here) which can be accessed through PlotItem.vb or PlotItem.getViewBox() (if you have a PlotWidget, you can get the PlotItem through PlotWidget.getPlotItem()). The menu items (QActions) can be accessed through PlotItem.vb.menu.actions() (Qt reference here) and can be removed by checking the QAction.text() to find the QAction you want to change or remove.

• PlotItem (source code here) creates a menu called ctrlMenu, which contains the plot options (e.g. Transform, Downsample). This is the "Plot Options" submenu in the image above, and does not appear in the PlotItem.vb.menu.actions() but can be accessed via PlotItem.ctrlMenu.menuAction() (StackOverflow reference).

• The "Export..." option comes from the underlying GraphicsScene (source code here) and can be accessed via ViewBox.scene().contextMenu[0] which gives the "Export..." QAction.

• Any of the QAction can be hidden/shown by QAction.setVisible() (Qt reference)

Answer 2

Use the PlotItem.setMenuEnabled method. Something like:

    self.plot = pg.PlotItem()
    self.plot.setMenuEnabled(False)

I have not found a way to remove options from it but perhaps it's possible. I would be interested in this as well.

Answer 3

Found a way to edit & remove the options, check this out: ViewBoxMenu

remove the Export... Options is found here: Export... (contextMenu)

i just cleared the list:

export = self.gui.Display.ui.graphicsView.sceneObj.contextMenu
del export[:]

Answer 4

In practice to implement Elliot's answer I would subclass Viewbox, after the initialization you can hide the action of the default ViewBoxMenu which you don't want to use. Then you can add your own actions to the self.menu.

Below I hide the "X-axis" option and add a submenu to the default ViewBox contextual menu to change the background color.

plot = pg.PlotWidget(title="New Menu",viewBox=NewViewBox())
 

class NewViewBox(pg.ViewBox):
        def __init__(self,parent=None):
            super(NewViewBox, self).__init__(parent)

            self.myMenuEdit() 

        def myMenuEdit(self):
            #Hide Default Actions
            MenusToHide = ["X axis"] #Names of menus to hide
            w = self.menu.actions()
            for m in w:
                for mhs in MenusToHide:
                    if (m.text().startswith(mhs)):
                        m.setVisible(False)
                        break

            #AddMySubMenu
            leftMenu = self.menu.addMenu("Background color")
            group = QtGui.QActionGroup(self)
            Yellow = QtGui.QAction(u'Yellow', group)
            Red = QtGui.QAction(u'Red', group)
            leftMenu.addActions(group.actions())
            Yellow.setCheckable(True)
            Red.setCheckable(True)
            group.triggered.connect(self.setBgColor)
            self.bgActions=[Yellow,Red]




        def setBgColor(self, action):
              mode = None
              if action == self.bgActions[0]:
                  self.setBackgroundColor("y")
              elif action == self.bgActions[1]:
                  self.setBackgroundColor("r")

Note that each parent of the ViewBox which has a method getContextMenus has its own menu options and they will be loaded and added to the menu at each click through the call of self.scene().addParentContextMenus(self, menu, ev) in the function raiseContextMenu.

PlotItem, for example, adds Export and Plot Options. You can override the menus of each of those parental classes if needed.