GTK+ Forums

I need to make a label widget respond to mouse clicks. But when I try to do this with g_signal_connect for "button-press-event", after setting the event mask with gtk_widget_add_events to GDK_BUTTON_PRESS_MASK my event handler is still not called. gdk_widget_set_sensitive also does not help. Is there something special about label widgets that prevents them from accepting events?

I know that it is possible to put a label inside a button, but the standard "clicked" handler for buttons does not tell me which mouse button was causing the event (which I need to know in the handler)? In addition I could not get rid of the border (GTK_RELIEF_NONE does still cause borders on my system when you operate the button, and reserves space around them to do that, both very much unwanted).

I also tried to use a button_with_label directly, manipulating the label like it was a label widget, but in this case (apart from the border problem, which is less severe in this case, as no margins are reserved between label text and border) it does not seem possible to apply the same text formatting (controlling font size and color with gtk_label_set_markup) as in true label widgets.

Hi.

GtkLabel does not respond to GtkWidget::button-press-event because it doesn't have a GdkWindows associated with. If you want to catch those signals on label, you'll need to wrap it in GtkEventBox and connect to signals on this box.

Cheers,
Tadej

OK, thanks. That really gave me the clue I needed to solve this. I have put the label widget inside a GtkEventBox now, and connect the signals to those. That also helped me solve another problem I was struggling with. To highlight the widget (which display clocks above a Chess board), the foreground and background colors of the text are swapped. But the text did not fill the entire area of the label widget, only the part that was written. By setting the bg color of the EventBox the same as that of the text, I can acheive perfect rectangular highlighting: