Liferea Plugins Tutorial Part 2

Let’s continue the plugin tutorial! The last installement was on how plugins work and how to create the boilerplate for a new plugin. Now let’s look into how to access Liferea UI elements and how to modify them.

Accessing UI elements

Using the plugin boilerplate for a Liferea.ShellActivatable (a plugin that activates once the Liferea shell, which as an object comprises the entire main window UI, has been setup) we get a member variable named shell

shell = GObject.property (type=Liferea.Shell)

which can be used to look up GTK objects by name using

shell.lookup(<some name>)

Some interesting names to look up are:

Name	Description
mainwindow	The main GtkWindow
leftpane	The vertical pane containing the feed list
rightpane	The vertical pane containing the rest
feedlist	The feed list GtkTreeView
itemlist	The item list GtkTreeView
browsertabs	The tabs notebook of the item view
statusbar	The main window status bar

This list not being exhaustive you can grep the code for more uses

rgrep liferea_shell_lookup src/

in general when you want to modify existing UI elements or add extra elements to the UI above list should be a good start.

Example: Modifying the feed list

Here is a simple example to hide the 2nd column of the feed list GtkTreeView. To do this we use the shell member to look up the feedlist GtkTreeView and ask it for the 2nd column which we then hide:

from gi.repository import GObject, Peas, PeasGtk, Gtk, Liferea, Gdk

class NrColumnHidePlugin (GObject.Object, Liferea.ShellActivatable):
    __gtype_name__ = 'NrColumnHidePlugin'

    object = GObject.property (type=GObject.Object)
    shell = GObject.property (type=Liferea.Shell)

    def do_activate (self):
        treeview = self.shell.lookup ("feedlist")
        column = Gtk.TreeView.get_column (treeview, 1)
        Gtk.TreeViewColumn.set_visible (column, 0);

    def do_deactivate (self):
        return

This is all done on activate, nothing needs to be done on deactivation.

Also check out the other plugin tutorial posts

Plugin Tutorial Part 1 (Plugin Boiler Plate)
Plugin Tutorial Part 2 (Acessing and modify UI elements)
Plugin Tutorial Part 3 (Adding menu elements)
Plugin Tutorial Part 4 (Using GTK inspector)
Plugin Tutorial Part 5 (Enabling translations for plugins)

Accessing UI elements

Example: Modifying the feed list

Related