ColorButton

A color-selector tool for PyQt
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Below is a short snippet to implement a color-picker attached to a button in Qt. Clicking on the button pops up a dialog (native) to select a color. The color is shown by the color of the button face. You can provide a default color which will be the initial state of the button when it is created -- right-clicking on the button will reset the color to this default value (or None if no default is set)

To get the currently set color, use button.color().

python
from PyQt5 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets
from PyQt5.QtCore import Qt, pyqtSignal

class ColorButton(QtWidgets.QPushButton):
    '''
    Custom Qt Widget to show a chosen color.

    Left-clicking the button shows the color-chooser, while
    right-clicking resets the color to None (no-color).
    '''

    colorChanged = pyqtSignal(object)

    def __init__(self, *args, color=None, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        self._color = None
        self._default = color
        self.pressed.connect(self.onColorPicker)

        # Set the initial/default state.
        self.setColor(self._default)

    def setColor(self, color):
        if color != self._color:
            self._color = color
            self.colorChanged.emit(color)

        if self._color:
            self.setStyleSheet("background-color: %s;" % self._color)
        else:
            self.setStyleSheet("")

    def color(self):
        return self._color

    def onColorPicker(self):
        '''
        Show color-picker dialog to select color.

        Qt will use the native dialog by default.

        '''
        dlg = QtWidgets.QColorDialog(self)
        if self._color:
            dlg.setCurrentColor(QtGui.QColor(self._color))

        if dlg.exec_():
            self.setColor(dlg.currentColor().name())

    def mousePressEvent(self, e):
        if e.button() == Qt.RightButton:
            self.setColor(self._default)

        return super().mousePressEvent(e)

python
from PySide2 import QtCore, QtGui, QtWidgets
from PySide2.QtCore import Qt, Signal


class ColorButton(QtWidgets.QPushButton):
    '''
    Custom Qt Widget to show a chosen color.

    Left-clicking the button shows the color-chooser, while
    right-clicking resets the color to None (no-color).
    '''

    colorChanged = Signal(object)

    def __init__(self, *args, color=None, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        self._color = None
        self._default = color
        self.pressed.connect(self.onColorPicker)

        # Set the initial/default state.
        self.setColor(self._default)

    def setColor(self, color):
        if color != self._color:
            self._color = color
            self.colorChanged.emit(color)

        if self._color:
            self.setStyleSheet("background-color: %s;" % self._color)
        else:
            self.setStyleSheet("")

    def color(self):
        return self._color

    def onColorPicker(self):
        '''
        Show color-picker dialog to select color.

        Qt will use the native dialog by default.

        '''
        dlg = QtWidgets.QColorDialog(self)
        if self._color:
            dlg.setCurrentColor(QtGui.QColor(self._color))

        if dlg.exec_():
            self.setColor(dlg.currentColor().name())

    def mousePressEvent(self, e):
        if e.button() == Qt.RightButton:
            self.setColor(self._default)

        return super().mousePressEvent(e)

This custom widget is also available in the LearnPyQt qtwidgets library.

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ColorButton was written by Martin Fitzpatrick .

Martin Fitzpatrick has been developing Python/Qt apps for 8 years. Building desktop applications to make data-analysis tools more user-friendly, Python was the obvious choice. Starting with Tk, later moving to wxWidgets and finally adopting PyQt.