How to make entry widget get input when pressed enter key

[kaile]

Hi all,

I would like the entry widget respond when text is typed and enter key is pressed. I followed the documentation keyboard events programming with gtkmm 3 but could not resolve the issue. Any guidance would be really helpful

Thanks

[dboles]

So, show what you have tried…? Don’t make people guess, please.

You probably just need to connect a slot to signal_activate() and have that slot do whatever you want to happen on Enter. Or did you already try that and it doesn’t work somehow?

[kaile]

Ok, I can get mouse clicked on widgets but not in entry widget. My plan is to first check if mouse has clicked on entry widget then check if there is a enter key hit afterwards then proceed. Maybe this is not the way to do it or maybe there is a much more simpler way to achieve this task, I have no idea.

this->signal_button_press_event().connect( sigc::mem_fun( *this, &ExampleWindow::onButtonPress), false)

bool onButtonPress(GdkEventButton* event){

std::cout<<“mouse clicked”<<std::endl;

so far I am here

[dboles]

Yes, the much simpler, better way to do it is by connecting to signal_activate(), as I mentioned, which is specifically to tell you ‘the user was in this entry and now they have pressed Enter’. You should not need to manually check whether they are there with the pointer, or manually check for specific key presses. So, have you tried signal_activate()?

[kaile]

m_Entry->signal_activate().connect( sigc::mem_fun( *this, &ExampleWindow::onButtonPress), false)

returns error on compilation : error base operand of ‘->’ has non-pointer type ‘Gtk::Entry’

[dboles]

Others can’t read all your compiler error messages for you; at some point you have to think a little bit about them. That one is probably because you declare m_Entry by value, not by pointer, but uncritically just substituted the this pointer with m_Entry without accommodating that the latter is not a pointer. If so, just use . instead of -> to match. So, use m_Entry.signal_activate().connect(whatever) - and of course you’ll need to ensure the connected function has the right arguments - in this case, none (void), so you can’t just swap in your handler for button_press_event without removing its arguments - and so on, stopping to think about any error you get along the way.

[kaile]

I can’t find signal_activate there is only activate() I am a little lost here. Can you provide an example on how to achieve this ?

[dboles]

You said you are using gtkmm 3, which does have Entry.signal_activate(), as my link says, so if you are indeed using gtkmm 3 then I can’t see how it would not be available.

If you are using gtkmm 4, then I checked the gtkmm/entry.h file for you quickly, and apparently that has indeed renamed it to .activate() (it was removed and then re-added, and from reading the linked issues, I’m not sure the rename was 100% intentional, but here we are). So… just try it?

Beyond that, sorry, I don’t know of an example or have time to make one.

[kaile]

Ok, thank you for your effort, I figured it out!