How to set Text widget insert cursor by event.x_root and event.y_root in Tkinter/TkinterDnD

Question

I want to implement a Text Drag-n-Drop feature in my text editor. So far I get the text that I've dropped by event.data , and the position where I dropped the text by event.x_root and event.y_root . Please help me out with setting insert cursor of tk.Text by dropped position.

I'm using tkdnd2.8 as an extension and TkinterDnD2 as a wrapper.

Here is my code:

import tkinter as tk
import TkinterDnD2.TkinterDnD as tkdnd


def drop(event):
    print("x: %d"%event.x_root, "y: %d"%event.y_root, "text:'%s'"%event.data)


root = tkdnd.Tk()
text = tk.Text(root, width=50, height=10)
text.pack()
text.drop_target_register("DND_Text")
text.dnd_bind('<<Drop:DND_Text>>', drop)
root.mainloop()

If I drag a piece of text "SomeText" onto my text widget, here is the console output:

x: 60 y: 306 text:'SomeText'

Now I'm struggle on how to convert the position from pixel scale to character scale so that I can set it to text widget's INSERT cursor and insert text into my text widget.

Or, can I just emit a "<Button-1>" and "<ButtonRelease-1>" event at certain position? If so, how can I do that?

Answer 1

You can specify an index by a coordinate using the format @x,y . From the canonical tcl/tk documentation

@x,y Indicates the character that covers the pixel whose x and y coordinates within the text's window are x and y.

You should use the event x and y for the widget, not for the root. This is a standard, documented feature of the Text widget. You can use an f-string to create the index like so:

index = f"@{event.x},{event.y}"

The above will yield something like "@100,200".

You can use that index in any method call that takes an index. To convert that to a numerical index you can pass it to the index method. For example:

numerical_index = text.index(index)