Shortcuts for SysTrayIcon

joac

Hi

How do I add shortcuts (e.g. CTRL+SHIFT+C) to an application running exclusively as a SysTrayIcon? The shortcut would call a function currently called through the SysTrayIcon's QMenu. This post https://forum.qt.io/topic/18108/systray-and-keyboard-shortcuts describes a similar use-case, though the answer is not immediately helpful.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

SGaist

Hi and welcome to devnet,

So you would like something like a global shortcut that can be called from anywhere and make your application react ?

joac

@SGaist said in Shortcuts for SysTrayIcon:

Hi and welcome to devnet,

So you would like something like a global shortcut that can be called from anywhere and make your application react ?

Hi there, thank you, and yes!

The idea is to have the application sit as a tray icon, and then only react after the user calls a shortcut (or right-click the icon and choose something from the menu).

Thanks!

SGaist

Qt currently does not provide global shortcuts like that. IIRC, there was libQxt that did at the time.

joac

@SGaist said in Shortcuts for SysTrayIcon:

Qt currently does not provide global shortcuts like that. IIRC, there was libQxt that did at the time.

Thanks for your response.

It sounds like https://pypi.org/project/PyGlobalShortcut/ does what I need, so I will have a look.

Do you know if there are any plans to expand functionality to support something like this directly in Qt?

SGaist

There's QTBUG-5183 tracking it. I would say: patches welcome :-)

joac

@SGaist said in Shortcuts for SysTrayIcon:

There's QTBUG-5183 tracking it. I would say: patches welcome :-)

Hi again

Unfortunately, https://pypi.org/project/PyGlobalShortcut/ does not resolve the issue.

A possible solution is pynput's (https://pynput.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) keyboard which allows something like:

self.hotkey = keyboard.GlobalHotKeys({'<ctrl>+<alt>+h': self.shortcut_function})
self.hotkey.start()

The SysTrayIcon application properly catches this, but it gives the following exception:

QObject: Cannot create children for a parent that is in a different thread.

There are numerous ways in which I can support shortcuts in general, e.g. by using QShortCut and QKeySequence. The issue arises when the application is not in focus; indeed when it is a SysTrayIcon. I have not yet managed to resolve this.

SGaist

The Qxt library was providing something for that. You could make a small library with that and the make python bindings for it.