Set cursor position in a Text widget

Question

Is it possible to set the cursor position in a Tkinter Text widget? I'm not finding anything terribly useful yet.

The best I've been able to do is emit a <Button-1> and <ButtonRelease-1> event at a certain x-y coordinate, but that is a pixel amount, not a letter amount.

score 12 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 07 '22 at 02:53

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If "text", "line", and "column" are your text object, the desired text line and desired column variables are, respectively:

text.mark_set("insert", "%d.%d" % (line + 1, column + 1))

If you would not like to care about the line number... well, you have to.

Complete documentation at The Tkinter Text Widget.

edited Mar 07 '22 at 02:53

martineau

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answered Jul 09 '10 at 19:00

jsbueno

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Perfect! I thought it might be somewhere along those lines but I couldn't figure it out. Is there a related method for getting the current cursor position? – Wayne Werner Jul 09 '10 at 19:35
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@Wayne Werner: the "index" method will return the index of any position including the insertion cursor: `text.index("insert")` – Bryan Oakley Jul 09 '10 at 23:12
`effbot.org` link has been broken for a long time now. :( – WinEunuuchs2Unix May 07 '21 at 20:19
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Thanks. Pointed it to the content backed up by archive.org. – jsbueno May 07 '21 at 22:23
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lines are one-based, columns are zero-based. so, the top-left position ("home") is `1.0` – milahu Apr 06 '22 at 18:06

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 09 '10 at 21:11

To set the cursor position, you can use the text_widget.mark_set method, with "insert" (or Tkinter.INSERT for a “constant”) first argument and, for the second argument, one of many forms, the most useful being:

"%d,%d" % (line, column), where line is 1-based and column is 0-based
"1.0+%d chars" % index, where index is 0-based just like a string/unicode index in Python

To get the index of a mark, you can use the text_widget.index method:

text_widget.index(Tkinter.INSERT)

nilsoviani · Answer 3 · 2018-03-14T21:48:48.603

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This property is just for Text Widget, because for Entry Widget we could use:

entry_widget_name.icursor("position")

For Text Widget will be:

text_widget_name.mark_set("insert", "%d.%d" % (x,y))

where x = row position y = column position

(using integer numbers with dots like 1.0 or 3.0 for example)

edited Mar 14 '18 at 21:48

answered Mar 14 '18 at 16:57

nilsoviani

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Set cursor position in a Text widget

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