Using the Popup Toolkit

This guide explains how to create popups that can be used to add functionality to widgets or create standalone launchers.

What’s in the toolkit?

The Toolkit has two types of object, a layout and a control. The layout is the container that helps organise the presentation of the popup. The controls are the objects that display the content.

A simple comparison would be to think of the Bar as the layout and widgets as the controls. However, a key difference of this toolkit is that the controls can be placed anywhere in a 2D space whereas widgets can only be ordered in one dimension.

Layouts

The toolkit provides three layouts: PopupGridLayout, PopupRelativeLayout and PopupAbsoluteLayout.

Descriptions and configuration options of these layouts can be found on the reference page.

Controls

Currently, the following controls are provided:

PopupText: a simple text display object
PopupImage: a control to display an image
PopupSlider: a control to draw a line which marks a particular value (e.g. volume level)
PopupCircularProgress: a control to draw a curved line showing progress etc.
PopupWidget: a control to display a Qtile widget in the popup

Configuration options for these controls can be found on the reference page.

Callbacks

To add functionality to your popup, you need to bind callbacks to the individual controls. This is achieved in the same way as widgets i.e. a dictionary of mouse_callbacks is passed as a configuration option for the control. The control accepts any callable function but also accepts lazy objects like those used for key bindings.

Updating controls

There may be times when you wish to update the contents of the popup without having to rebuild the whole popup. This is possible by using the popup.update_controls method. The method works by taking the name of the control (as set by the name parameter) as a keyword. Multiple controls can be updated in the same call.

from qtile_extras.popup import (
    PopupRelativeLayout,
    PopupText
)

text_popup = None

def create_text_popup(qtile):
    global text_popup
    text_popup = PopupRelativeLayout(
        qtile,
        width=400,
        height=200,
        controls=[
            PopupText(
                text="Original Text",
                width=0.9,
                height=0.9,
                pos_x=0.05,
                pos_y=0.05,
                v_align="middle",
                h_align="center",
                fontsize=20,
                name="textbox1"
            ),
        ],
        inital_focus=None,
        close_on_click=False,
    )

    text_popup.show(centered=True)

def update_text_popup(qtile):
    text_popup.update_controls(textbox1="Updated Text")

Extending widgets

To simplify the process of adding popup support to widgets, users are advised to use the qtile_extras.widget.mixins.ExtendedPopupMixin class as this will create a number of attributes and methods to help display popups.

For example, to make the Clock widget show the long date when clicked:

from datetime import datetime

from libqtile import widget

from qtile_extras import widget as extrawidgets
from qtile_extras.popup import PopupRelativeLayout, PopupText, PopupWidget
from qtile_extras.widget.mixins import ExtendedPopupMixin


class ExtendedClock(widget.Clock, ExtendedPopupMixin):
    def __init__(self, **config):
        widget.Clock.__init__(self, **config)
        ExtendedPopupMixin.__init__(self, **config)
        self.add_defaults(ExtendedPopupMixin.defaults)
        self.add_callbacks({"Button1": self.show_popup})

    def _update_popup(self):
        longdate = datetime.now().strftime("%A %d %B %Y")
        self.extended_popup.update_controls(longdate=longdate)


clock_layout = PopupRelativeLayout(
    width=250,
    height=250,
    controls=[
        PopupText(
            name="longdate",
            pos_x=0.1,
            pos_y=0.05,
            width=0.8,
            height=0.05,
            h_align="center",
        ),
        PopupWidget(
            widget=extrawidgets.AnalogueClock(
                second_size=2,
                minute_size=4,
                hour_size=6,
                face_shape="circle",
                face_background="222222",
                face_border_width=4,
            ),
            pos_x=0.05,
            pos_y=0.1,
            width=0.9,
            height=0.9,
        ),
    ],
    background="00000000",
)

extended_clock = ExtendedClock(
    popup_layout=clock_layout,
    popup_hide_timeout=0,
    popup_show_args={"relative_to": 3, "relative_to_bar": True},
)

Putting extended_clock in your bar and clicking on the clock will give you this:

Building simple text menus

The toolkit also contains some basic classes to simplify the creation of text based menus. The primary use of these classes is to provide context menus for widgets (e.g. StatusNotifier) but they can also be easily incorporated directly in config files.

For example, to recreate the power menu above using text, you could define the following:

from libqtile.lazy import lazy

from qtile_extras.popup import PopupMenu, PopupMenuItem, PopupMenuSeparator


@lazy.function
def show_text_power_menu(qtile):
    items = [
        PopupMenuItem(text="Power Menu", enabled=False),
        PopupMenuSeparator(),
        PopupMenuItem(
            text="Lock",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.spawn("/path/to/lock_cmd")
            }
        ),
        PopupMenuItem(
            text="Sleep",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.spawn("/path/to/lock_cmd")
            }
        ),
        PopupMenuItem(
            text="Shutdown",
            highlight="900",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.shutdown()
            }
        ),
    ]
    menu = PopupMenu.generate(qtile, menuitems=items, border_width=2)
    menu.show(centered=True)

keys = [
    ...
    Key([mod, "shift"], "q", show_text_power_menu)
    ...
]

Pressing Mod + shift + B will display the following:

Menu items have a default blue/green highlight but this was overriden to show red for the shutdown command.

Note that the menu items can be configured individually. Configuration options for the layout (border etc.) are passed to the generate method.

Alternatively, the PopupMenu.make_generators method can be used to apply a config to menu items and the layout. It returns three functions which are used to create menu items, separators and the layout. For example, to recreate the text menu above with a custom theme, you could do the following:

from libqtile.lazy import lazy

from qtile_extras.popup import PopupMenu


# Define config for menu and create functions to generate menu
menu_config = {
    "foreground": "0ff",
    "foreground_disabled": "666",
    "foreground_highlighted": "fff",
    "highlight": "900",
    "border_width": 2
}

item, separator, generate = PopupMenu.make_generators(**menu_config)


@lazy.function
def show_text_power_menu(qtile):
    items = [
        item(text="Power Menu", enabled=False),
        separator(),
        item(
            text="Lock",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.spawn("/path/to/lock_cmd")
            }
        ),
        item(
            text="Sleep",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.spawn("/path/to/lock_cmd")
            }
        ),
        item(
            text="Shutdown",
            mouse_callbacks={
                "Button1": lazy.shutdown()
            }
        ),
    ]
    menu = generate(qtile, menuitems=items)
    menu.show(centered=True)

keys = [
    ...
    Key([mod, "shift"], "q", show_text_power_menu)
    ...
]

Configuration options for the menu objects can be found on the reference page.