[ Enhancement ] A potential Drag and Drop solution on tkinter that's in the user code space. No PSG modification needed
Type of Issue (Enhancement, Error, Bug, Question)
Enhancement
Operating System
Tested on Windows so far
PySimpleGUI Port (tkinter, Qt, Wx, Web)
tkinter
Versions
Python version (sg.sys.version)
Tested on 3.11 & 3.14
PySimpleGUI Version (sg.__version__)
6.1.6
In theory this hack should work with almost any version of PySimpleGUI
GUI Version (tkinter (sg.tclversion_detailed), PySide2, WxPython, Remi)
Tested on 8.6.12 & 8.6.15
Detailed Description
Drag and drop has been something we've wanted on tkinter for some time, but I hadn't found a way to do it that didn't involve pulling more packages/code into PySimpleGUI itself. I might have found a way to do it entirely in the user code space. It looks really sketchy, but does seem to work.
I created a dummy window using the tkinterdnd2 package, hide the window, then created a PySimpleGUI window. After the window is finalized, I registered the Input Element's widget as a drop target and set a callback function.
I opened an issue in the tkinterdnd2 GitHub repo (the one for the matching PyPI package) to see if this a reasonable technique or if I just got lucky in a narrow use case. It would be awesome if it's this simple to add drag and drop to a tkinter PySimpleGUI application. Hoping to hear back that it'll work.
Code To Duplicate
import PySimpleGUI as sg
from tkinterdnd2 import TkinterDnD, DND_FILES
#----------------------- tkinterdnd2 specific -------------------------------------#
def dnd_init():
# Make a TkinterDnD dummy window and hide it
root = TkinterDnD.Tk()
root.attributes('-alpha', 0)
root.withdraw()
dnd_init.root = root
def dnd_exit():
dnd_init.root.destroy()
def register_element_dnd(element:sg.Element):
element.widget.drop_target_register(DND_FILES)
element.widget.dnd_bind("<<Drop>>", on_drop)
#-------------------------PySimpleGUI code ----------------------------------------#
def on_drop(event):
# Called when a drop event happens
filepath = event.data.replace("{", "").replace("}", "") # remove {} filenames with spaces are in format "{filename with spaces}"
window["-FILE-"].update(filepath)
dnd_init()
layout = [[sg.Text("Drag & Drop a File Here", key="-DROP-")],
[sg.Input("", key="-FILE-")],
[sg.Button("OK"), sg.Button("Cancel")]]
# layout = [[sg.Column(layout, p=0, k='-COL-')]] # if want to make the entire window the target
window = sg.Window("File Drop", layout, finalize=True)
register_element_dnd(window['-FILE-']) # register the Input element as the target
# register_element_dnd(window['-COL-']) # register the column element that contains the entire window as the target
while True:
event, values = window.read()
print(event, values)
if event in (sg.WIN_CLOSED, "Cancel"):
break
window.close()
dnd_exit() # being a good citizen and cleaning up the dummy window. May be able to get away with not destroying it
Screenshot, Sketch, or Drawing
Source: PySimpleGUI/PySimpleGUI