Hover over a word to select it then click it to print it

 Another good feature of an integrated development environment (IDE) is its ability to go to the definition of that function/variable/method/class when clicked or double clicked. It saves a lot of time especially when the project involves several thousands of lines of codes spread out over several files. To implement this function, a word must be able to be identified as the mouse hovers it and when selected, it should be clickable, In todays post, I have prepared a simple code snippet to do just that. What the program basically do is in the title itself, select a word by hovering the mouse pointer over it then click it to print it. To take this further, the program must be able to identify the word as a defined variable in the program or a class/method/function. I have already prepared a code snippet to identify if a word is a defined variable as stated on the planner in my chat application project, you may visit the logs here. The portion where I specifically mentioned this can be found at 'Plans for 03/08/2023'

Here is the code:

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from PyQt6.QtWidgets import QApplication, QTextEdit from PyQt6.QtGui import QTextCursor class HoverTextEdit(QTextEdit): def __init__(self, parent=None): super().__init__(parent) self.setMouseTracking(True) self.mousePressEvent = self.onMouseClick def mouseMoveEvent(self, event): super().mouseMoveEvent(event) cursor = self.cursorForPosition(event.pos()) cursor.select(QTextCursor.SelectionType.WordUnderCursor) self.setTextCursor(cursor) def onMouseClick(self, event): super().mousePressEvent(event) cursor = self.textCursor() if cursor.hasSelection(): selected_word = cursor.selectedText() print(selected_word) if __name__ == '__main__': app = QApplication([]) widget = HoverTextEdit() widget.show() app.exec()

Simple Find Function for my IDE Project

One of the key functions of a good IDE is the find function. This function is very important because based on my experience, I am having  such a hard time searching for a particular word in a 1000+ lines of codes. There are many ways to implement this like highlight all found words with the syntax hilighter so that all found words can be immediately be seen or create a small pane that enumerates the location of each found word and when clicked, the cursor will be positioned to that found word, or a combination of both, and many others. In this post I just implemented a simple way of searching a word in a QTextEdit widget by pressing contrl+f to enter the searchstring and the program will position the cursor to the first found word and select it. It is a very simple implementation and can be further modified with tons of features. 

Here is the screenshot:

Here is the code:

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from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QMainWindow, QTextEdit, QDialog, QVBoxLayout, QLabel, QLineEdit, QPushButton, QShortcut, QInputDialog, QMessageBox from PyQt5.QtGui import QKeySequence, QTextCursor, QTextCharFormat, QTextDocument from PyQt5.QtCore import Qt class MainWindow(QMainWindow): def __init__(self): super().__init__() self.initUI() def initUI(self): # Create a QTextEdit widget self.textEdit = QTextEdit(self) self.setCentralWidget(self.textEdit) # Create a shortcut for the "Find" action findShortcut = QShortcut(QKeySequence("Ctrl+F"), self) findShortcut.activated.connect(self.findText) # Show the main window self.show() def findText(self): # Show the find dialog box searchString, ok = QInputDialog.getText(self, "Find", "Find:") if not ok: return # Get the QTextCursor and QTextDocument cursor = self.textEdit.textCursor() document = self.textEdit.document() # Set the search options options = QTextDocument.FindFlags() options |= QTextDocument.FindCaseSensitively options |= QTextDocument.FindWholeWords # Add this line # Search for the text count = 0 #while True: cursor = document.find(searchString, cursor, options) #if cursor is None: # break count += 1 # Move the cursor to the beginning of the match and select the text cursor.movePosition(QTextCursor.StartOfWord) char_after_word = document.characterAt(cursor.position()) print(char_after_word) if searchString[0] != char_after_word: cursor.movePosition(QTextCursor.Left, QTextCursor.MoveAnchor, len(searchString)) cursor.movePosition(QTextCursor.EndOfWord, QTextCursor.KeepAnchor) self.textEdit.setTextCursor(cursor) self.textEdit.setFocus() if count == 0: QMessageBox.information(self, "Find", "No match found.") #else: # QMessageBox.information(self, "Find", f"{count} matches found.") # Create the QApplication app = QApplication([]) # Create the MainWindow mainWindow = MainWindow() # Run the event loop app.exec_()

In case where you just pressed the contro+v to paste a block of codes and you want the cursor to go back to the start(0,0) of the QTextEdit widget, you may add a keypress event. Here is the method:

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def onTextChanged(self): # Do something when the text changes global paste #print(paste) #pass if paste == 1: self.textEdit.moveCursor(QTextCursor.Start) paste = 0 def keyPressEvent(self, event): global paste # If Ctrl+V is pressed, move the cursor to the beginning of the QTextEdit widget if event.modifiers() == Qt.ControlModifier and event.key() == 16777249: self.textEdit.moveCursor(QTextCursor.Start) paste = 1 # Call the parent class's keyPressEvent to handle other key events super().keyPressEvent(event)

The keypress event will not be able to move the cursor to the start position so I added another method ontextchanged to handle the cursor position and I used global variable paste to store the result in keypressevent.