Member Avatar for SoulMazer

Hi, I've tried searching around for other problems similar to mine, and I was unable to find any. I seem to not be able to "color" text in a TextCtrl widget on Windows, but I can on Linux. I have a little screenshot and some code to show this:

Screenshot

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import wx

class MainWindow(wx.Frame):
    def __init__(self, parent, title, size_):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self, parent, title=title, size=size_)
        self.textArea = wx.TextCtrl(self, style=wx.TE_MULTILINE)
        self.textArea.AppendText("This text should be colored.")
        self.textArea.SetFocus()
        self.Show()
        self.colorText()
        
    def colorText(self):
        self.textArea.SetStyle(5, 9, wx.TextAttr("#ff9c00", "#000000"))

app = wx.PySimpleApp()
frame = MainWindow(None, "Example", (400,300))
app.MainLoop()

Is the SetStyle method not supported on Windows or what? Is there any way I could get around this problem? I think a while ago I read about being able to do this when you initiate the TextCtrl instance (line 8 of my code), by setting "style" equal to some special styling format, but I'm not positive about that.

Thanks in advance.

  • 1 Contributor
  • 1 Reply
  • 837 Views
  • 1 Month Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by SoulMazer

Dani AI

Generated

Short summary and clarification based on the thread: the difference you saw between Linux and Windows is not a bug in SetStyle — it is a platform limitation. As later discovered, on Windows wx.TextCtrl must be created using the native rich-edit support in order for character-level styling calls like SetStyle to have any effect (for example, include wx.TE_RICH2 along with wx.TE_MULTILINE when creating the control).

Why this matters: on GTK/wxGTK the multiline text widget exposes styling/tagging by default, so your calls to SetStyle work without extra flags. On Windows the default edit control is the plain edit control (no per-character attributes). Requesting the rich-edit variant switches the underlying native control to one that supports EM_SETCHARFORMAT, which SetStyle uses to apply colors, fonts, and backgrounds.

Practical tips and gotchas:

  • SetStyle uses character indices (start, end) — make sure you are using the correct 0-based positions and call it after the text exists (or use SetDefaultStyle before appending).
  • Use wx.TextAttr with wx.Colour instances (or valid wx color names) to avoid format issues.
  • If styling still fails, confirm the control was created with the rich-edit flag; a control created without it cannot be retrofitted.
  • For more robust, cross-platform rich formatting (multiple fonts, paragraphs, images), prefer wx.richtext.RichTextCtrl, which gives consistent behavior and many more features than wx.TextCtrl.

If the goal is just a few colored spans, wx.TextCtrl + rich-edit works fine once created correctly; for anything more complex, switch to RichTextCtrl or upgrade to a modern wxPython build where rich-text support and bug fixes are current.

Member Avatar for SoulMazer

Sorry for resurrecting the old thread, but I thought I would post the solution to my problem. On line 8 of my code, I create a multiline TextCtrl widget to put my text in. On Linux, this is all that is needed in order to style text. However, in Windows, you must add the wx.TE_RICH2 attribute to a TextCtrl widget in order to do this.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.