Real Python: Python and PyQt: Creating Menus, Toolbars, and Status Bars

When it comes to developing graphical user interface (GUI) applications with Python and PyQt, some of the most useful and versatile graphical elements that you’ll ever use are menus, toolbars, and status bars.

Menus and toolbars can make your applications look polished and professional, presenting users with an accessible set of options, while status bars allow you to display relevant information about the application’s status.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• What menus, toolbars, and status bars are
• How to create menus, toolbars, and status bars programmatically
• How to populate Python menu and toolbar using PyQt actions
• How to use status bars to display status information

In addition, you’ll learn some programming best practices that you can apply when creating menus, toolbars, and status bars with Python and PyQt. If you’re new to GUI programming with PyQt, then you can check out Python and PyQt: Building a GUI Desktop Calculator.

You can download the code and resources for the sample application that you’ll build in this tutorial by clicking on the box below:

Building Python Menu Bars, Menus, and Toolbars in PyQt

A menu bar is a region of a GUI application’s main window that holds menus. Menus are pull-down lists of options that provide convenient access to your application’s options. For example, if you were creating a text editor, then you might have some of the following menus in your menu bar:

• A File menu that provides some of the following menu options:
  • New for creating a new document
  • Open for opening an existing document
  • Open Recent for opening recent documents
  • Save for saving a document
  • Exit for exiting the application
• An Edit menu that provides some of the following menu options:
  • Copy for copying some text
  • Paste for pasting some text
  • Cut for cutting some text
• A Help menu that provides some of the following menu options:
  • Help Content for launching to user’s manual and help content
  • About for launching an About dialog

You can also add some of these options to a toolbar. A toolbar is a panel of buttons with meaningful icons that provide fast access to the most commonly used options in an application. In your text editor example, you could add options like New, Open, Save, Copy, and Paste to a toolbar.

In this section, you’ll learn the basics of how to add menu bars, menus, and toolbars to your GUI applications with Python and PyQt.

Before going any further, you’ll create a sample PyQt application that you’ll use throughout this tutorial. In each section, you’ll add new features and functionalities to this sample application. The application will be a main window–style application. This means that it’ll have a menu bar, a toolbar, a status bar, and a central widget.

Open your favorite code editor or IDE and create a Python file called sample_app.py. Then add the following code to it:

import sys

from PyQt5.QtCore import Qt
from PyQt5.QtWidgets import QApplication, QLabel, QMainWindow

class Window(QMainWindow):
    """Main Window."""
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        """Initializer."""
        super().__init__(parent)
        self.setWindowTitle("Python Menus & Toolbars")
        self.resize(400, 200)
        self.centralWidget = QLabel("Hello, World")
        self.centralWidget.setAlignment(Qt.AlignHCenter | Qt.AlignVCenter)
        self.setCentralWidget(self.centralWidget)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    win = Window()
    win.show()
    sys.exit(app.exec_())

Now sample_app.py contains all the code that you need for creating your sample PyQt application. In this case, Window inherits from QMainWindow. So, you’re building a main window–style application.

In the class initializer .__init__(), you first call the parent class’s initializer using super(). Then you set the title of the window using .setWindowTitle() and resize the window using .resize().

The window’s central widget is a QLabel object that you’ll use to show messages in response to certain user actions. These messages will display at the center of the window. To do this, you call .setAlignment() on the QLabel object with a couple of alignment flags.

If you run the application from your command line, then you’ll see the following window on your screen:

That’s it! You’ve created a main window–style application with Python and PyQt. You’ll use this sample application for all the upcoming examples in this tutorial.

Creating Menu Bars