Piemenu widget

Pie menus

Pie menus are circular popup menus.

A pie menu with all tooltips showing

Why pie menus? Because of faster selection than linear menus, due to the large slices near the cursor. Pie menus also aid muscle memory because selection is based on direction instead of distance. Additionally, pie menus only take up screen space when necessary, reducing visual distraction and clutter, unlike toolbars and menu bars.

A disadvantage of pie menus is the limited space on the menu surface. It is optimal to limit pie menus to 8 items and use submenus for additional items.

QPieMenu widget

Author: Peter Strath (email: pstrath@btinternet.com)

Features

Keyboard acceleration using the number pad and arrow keys. Press F1 to show all tooltips.
Submenu support a menu can popup another one.
Factory method to easily create entire menus.
Infinite edges for easy selection. While the Mac OS menu bar is "infinitely wide" due to its placement on the edge of the screen, pie menus are both infinitely wide and near the mouse cursor for faster selection.
Text editor and file browser examples.

Screenshots

A piemenu with no icons A piemenu with icons Showing selected item Press F1 to show all tooltips

Example

import piemenu, sys
from qt import *

qapp = QApplication(sys.argv)
qapp.connect(qapp, SIGNAL('lastWindowClosed()'), qapp, SLOT('quit()'))

def printActivated(item):
	print item.text()

menu = piemenu.createMenu(['Item 1', 'Item 2'])
menu.connect(menu, PYSIGNAL('activated'), printActivated)

qapp.setMainWidget(menu)
menu.eventLoop(QCursor.pos())

Dependencies

Software required to use the QPieMenu widget:

API

piemenu.QPieMenu methods:

insertItem(text, icon)
popup(x, y)
setBackground(background)

piemenu.QPieMenu signals:

activated(item)
highlighted(item)

piemenu.Item methods:

text()
icon()
setText(text)
setIcon(icon)

Download

Version 0.11.0 for Linux (85KB, 2006.01.15, changes)

Older versions

Development version

Latest version in development is available from a subversion repository. To check out a copy, use the following command:

svn co http://neoui.org/svn/neoui-pyqt/trunk neoui