Let the labels be selectable

So as we stated in the previous episode, there are a couple of features that we still need to add. We really wanted the user to be able to copy+paste the decoded or encoded message so that they can send it to their penpal. Turns out that this is a very easy thing to do. Gtk.Label has a method set_selectable() and we just needed to pass true to that method.

Give it a GUI

If you’ve been following along, you know that we are using GTK for our GUI. It took us a bit of time to get comfortable with it. I come from a web background and so I wanted to be able to create a <textarea> for the user to enter the message that they wanted to encode or decode. All that I could find was the the Gtk.Entry. It was an input, and it would work, but I wanted a larger space for text. I didn’t like that lots of text would get cut off in the Gtk.Entry widget. I found Gtk.TextView and I thought, “This is it! I think this will do what I want.”. However, it was not as easy to do what I wanted. I thought I would be able to just add the TextView to the flowbox and be done. I did this and it did work, however it was small and didn’t really look like the <textarea> that I’m familiar with. I spent a lot of time on Google trying to find an example of how to change the size. I must have been really off my game because I wasn’t having any luck finding an example. Sadly, I don’t recall where I finally found the answer. I feel like it was on the official documentation that I found set_size_request on the Gtk.TextView. I tried it out and was happy that it worked nicely for me.

Creating the Decode & Encode Modules

Life got really busy for a bit and so it took some time for us to get things rolling again. Thankfully April was able to get some work done on the decoder module and I, Ammon, was able to get a little work on the UI done.

Decoder Module

April selected the task of creating the decoder class. Her and Kaleb were able to create a file that would shift an alphabet and then find the correct letter by shifting the index of the encoded letter to output the correct letter. It works well in jupyter, but it’s not yet able to receive any user input, nor is it part of the UI.

Project GUIs with GTK3+

We are working on the final project to complete our Complete Python Bootcamp: Go from zero to hero in Python 3 at Udemy. We have decided that we will build a simple Caesar Cipher application that we are calling Penpal. During our conversation we decided that we would really like to try to make a GUI. We’ve taken inspiration from this online cipher tool.

Research

We started with Google, you know, like you do, and found a lot of options for GUIs with python. 2 of them stood out.