is there a way to bind key press to root without disturbing default binds in tkinter

Question

I am trying to add syntax highlighting to the text widget in tkinter i am using the code from another stack overflow question Pygments syntax highlighter in python tkinter text widget i binded the function for syntax hyghlighting to the root but the problem is that all the other default binds like CTRL A stops working. They work fine if i bind it to the text widget but the last entered letter doesnt get highlighted. Heres the code(i am new to programming so there might be many silly mistakes)

from tkinter import *
from pygments import lex
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer

def test(e):
    txt.mark_set("range_start", "1.0")
    data = txt.get("1.0", "end")
    for tag in txt.tag_names():
        txt.tag_remove(tag,"1.0","end")
    for token, content in lex(data, PythonLexer()):
        txt.mark_set("range_end", "range_start + %dc" % len(content))
        txt.tag_add(str(token), "range_start", "range_end")
        txt.mark_set("range_start", "range_end")

root=Tk()
txt=Text(root)
txt.pack(expand='yes')
txt.tag_configure("Token.Comment.Single", foreground='red')
root.bind('<Any-KeyPress>',test)
root.mainloop()

try: `controlbind=master.bind("", syn, add='+')` and let me know if it solved your problem. — Thingamabobs, May 15 '21 at 16:53
_"i binded the function for syntax hyghlighting to the root but the problem is that all the other default binds like CTRL A stops working. "_ - it shouldn't, that's not how tkinter bindings work. When I run your code, control-a continues to work as I would expect it to. — Bryan Oakley, May 15 '21 at 17:43
@BryanOakley is my code working? is there some setting that i need to change? Because i tried the same code on my windows10 laptop and win7 and ubuntu vm's on all of these default binds like ctrl a,ctrl c,etc doesnt work unless i stop syntax highlighting — mystic lightning, May 16 '21 at 02:40
Like I said in my earlier comment, when I ran your code, control-a did exactly what the default binding said it should do. — Bryan Oakley, May 16 '21 at 04:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 15 '21 at 17:50

The problem isn't because you're replacing the default bindings. That's simply not how bindings work in tkinter. There are no bindings directly tied to the root widget or any other specific widget. Default bindings are implemented as bindings on "all" or on widget classes, not individual widgets.

They work fine if i bind it to the text widget but the last entered letter doesnt get highlighted.

That is because a binding on a widget happens before the default bindings. So, if you type "a", your code will be called before the code that inserts the letter "a".

There is a question on this site related to the order in which events are processed. While the answer is tied to an Entry widget, the exact same concept applies to all widgets. See this answer to the question Basic query regarding bindtags in tkinter

Thanks for trying to help but i found it Everytime i run the function for syntax highlighting i was removing all the tags including the selection tag ,adding an if statement to check if the tag is not 'sel' worked — mystic lightning, May 16 '21 at 03:22

is there a way to bind key press to root without disturbing default binds in tkinter

1 Answers1