Flat Text Buttons#

For an introduction the GUI system, see GUI Concepts.

The arcade.gui.UIFlatButton is a simple button with a text label. It doesn’t have any three-dimensional look to it.

Screen shot of flat text buttons

There are three ways to process button click events:

  1. Create a class with a parent class of arcade.UIFlatButton and implement a method called on_click.

  2. Create a button, then set the on_click attribute of that button to equal the function you want to be called.

  3. Create a button. Then use a decorator to specify a method to call when an on_click event occurs for that button.

This code shows each of the three ways above. Code should pick ONE of the three ways and standardize on it though-out the program. Do NOT write code that uses all three ways.

gui_flat_button.py#
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"""
Example code showing how to create a button,
and the three ways to process button events.

If Python and Arcade are installed, this example can be run from the command line with:
python -m arcade.examples.gui_flat_button
"""
import arcade
import arcade.gui


# --- Method 1 for handling click events,
# Create a child class.
import arcade.gui.widgets.buttons
import arcade.gui.widgets.layout


class QuitButton(arcade.gui.widgets.buttons.UIFlatButton):
    def on_click(self, event: arcade.gui.UIOnClickEvent):
        arcade.exit()


class MyWindow(arcade.Window):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__(800, 600, "UIFlatButton Example", resizable=True)

        # --- Required for all code that uses UI element,
        # a UIManager to handle the UI.
        self.manager = arcade.gui.UIManager()
        self.manager.enable()

        # Set background color
        arcade.set_background_color(arcade.color.DARK_BLUE_GRAY)

        # Create a vertical BoxGroup to align buttons
        self.v_box = arcade.gui.widgets.layout.UIBoxLayout(space_between=20)

        # Create the buttons
        start_button = arcade.gui.widgets.buttons.UIFlatButton(
            text="Start Game", width=200
        )
        self.v_box.add(start_button)

        settings_button = arcade.gui.widgets.buttons.UIFlatButton(
            text="Settings", width=200
        )
        self.v_box.add(settings_button)

        # Again, method 1. Use a child class to handle events.
        quit_button = QuitButton(text="Quit", width=200)
        self.v_box.add(quit_button)

        # --- Method 2 for handling click events,
        # assign self.on_click_start as callback
        start_button.on_click = self.on_click_start

        # --- Method 3 for handling click events,
        # use a decorator to handle on_click events
        @settings_button.event("on_click")
        def on_click_settings(event):
            print("Settings:", event)

        # Create a widget to hold the v_box widget, that will center the buttons
        ui_anchor_layout = arcade.gui.widgets.layout.UIAnchorLayout()
        ui_anchor_layout.add(child=self.v_box, anchor_x="center_x", anchor_y="center_y")

        self.manager.add(ui_anchor_layout)

    def on_click_start(self, event):
        print("Start:", event)

    def on_draw(self):
        self.clear()
        self.manager.draw()


window = MyWindow()
arcade.run()