Simple Way To Toggle Fullscreen With F11 In Pygtk

I am not a professional programmer but am regularly using PyGTK and Cairo for data visualization testing and prototyping. I have a standard template of PyGTK that I took from the w

Solution 1:

Let's start with how to pick up on the keypress: we need to connect to the key-press-event signal. But we need something to connect it to, of course.

This something should keep track of the window state, so it makes sense to use a class that connects to the window-state-event signal and keeps track of whether the window is full screen or not.

So we need an object that:

1. Keeps track of the fullscreen/not-fullscreen state of a particular window, and
2. Detects a keypress event and figures out what to do with it

How do we actually toggle the fullscreen state though? Easy, use the window.fullscreen() / window.unfullscreen() functions.

So we have something like:

classFullscreenToggler(object):

    def__init__(self, window, keysym=gtk.keysyms.F11):
        self.window = window
        self.keysym = keysym
        self.window_is_fullscreen = False
        self.window.connect_object('window-state-event',
                                   FullscreenToggler.on_window_state_change,
                                   self)

    defon_window_state_change(self, event):
        self.window_is_fullscreen = bool(
            gtk.gdk.WINDOW_STATE_FULLSCREEN & event.new_window_state)

    deftoggle(self, event):
        if event.keyval == self.keysym:
            if self.window_is_fullscreen:
                self.window.unfullscreen()
            else:
                self.window.fullscreen()

This takes a window and optional keysym constant (defaulting to F11). Use it like so:

toggler = FullscreenToggler(window)
window.connect_object('key-press-event', FullscreenToggler.toggle, toggler)

Note the use of connect_object instead of connect, which saves us adding an unused parameter.

Side-note: If there was an easy way to check if the window was fullscreen, we could avoid this class-based approach and use a function, that did something like:

def fullscreen_toggler(window, event, keysym=gtk.keysyms.F11):
    ifevent.keyval == keysym:
        fullscreen = bool(
                gtk.gdk.WINDOW_STATE_FULLSCREEN &
                window.get_property('window-state'))
        if fullscreen:
            window.unfullscreen()
        else:
            window.fullscreen()

...and then...

window.connect('key-press-event', fullscreen_toggler)

But I couldn't find a property for this.