2

I am trying to make a widget-style application in Python, and I have tried searching around but I have not found a GUI toolkit that allows you to hide borders and remove the window background (fully transparent, only content rendered).

Is there a Python GUI toolkit with the following features?:

  • No window borders.
  • Completely transparent background.
  • Non-OS specific GUI control rendering (custom bitmaps, fonts, etc).
  • Event Detection (click, keyboard, etc)
  • Window Management (always on top, steal focus, etc)
Cœur
  • 37,241
  • 25
  • 195
  • 267
Port
  • 37
  • 2
  • 6
  • Window borders and transparency are handled by the window manager. I don't think there is any cross-platform way of removing them (though I could be wrong). You could write a KDE plasma widget, but that's a lot of baggage for one widget. – Thomas K Mar 01 '11 at 18:00
  • Window borders are drawn by the window manager, but there's a standard way to request that they be drawn, or not. If there wasn't, then it would be impossible for a GUI toolkit to do something as basic as show a pop-up menu! – Ken Mar 01 '11 at 18:43

2 Answers2

3

Yes, wxpython can do this. Look at the ShapedWindow example in the Demo application (available on the download page). enter image description here

tangentstorm
  • 7,183
  • 2
  • 29
  • 38
1

It's been a little while since I've done things like that, but I would think that most GUI toolkits would allow you to do that. For example, GTK+ has Python bindings, and should support all of that.

Here's an example of using GTK+ to draw transparent content with GUI controls.

I have even less experience with them, but I think wxWidgets and Qt/KDE have similar functionality.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Ken
  • 726
  • 1
  • 5
  • 7