…code, cg, electronics, 3d printing…

(This post has its own page here)

While working on my ‘Tablet Pressure‘ code, I realized I needed a way to be able to query the position of the active Pygame screen relative to the desktop. There didn’t seem to be any built-in way in Pygame to do this.

After doing some searching, I ran across Python‘s ctypes bindings. These let you tap into Windows (the OS) ‘window info’. Based on fiddling with that code, I’ve come up with a Python class that lets you query a few things:

• The extents of the active Pygame window relative to the desktop: top, bottom, left, and right coordinates.
• The extents of the active Pygame screen inside that window, relative to the desktop: top, bottom, left, and right coordinates.
• The width of the window border edges, and the title bar.

Download the source here:

• pygameWindowInfo_0_1.py – Windows OS only. Sorry
• Tested with Pygame 1.9.1, and Python 2.6.2

It comes with its own unit test: Executing from a shell will give you a floating resizable Pygame window, and a printout like this in the shell, showing its functionality:

Here’s the unit test code, showcasing its functionality:

# Unit Testing:
if __name__ == "__main__":
    """Unit Test, will print window, screen and border thicknesses to the shell."""

    pygame.init()

    # Must set this env var for PygameWindowInfo to work!
    os.environ['SDL_VIDEO_WINDOW_POS'] = "128,128"

    screen = pygame.display.set_mode((256, 256), pygame.RESIZABLE)
    pygame.display.set_caption("PygameWindowInfo v%s"%__version__)

    # Create our object:
    winInfo = PygameWindowInfo()

    # Main loop:
    looping = True
    while looping:
        # ***Must update our winInfo object during every loop*** to accurately
        #  track window and display screen position
        winInfo.update()

        screen.fill(pygame.Color("black"))

        events = pygame.event.get()
        for event in events:
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                looping = False
            if event.type == pygame.VIDEORESIZE:
                WIDTH, HEIGHT = event.size
                screen = pygame.display.set_mode((WIDTH, HEIGHT), pygame.RESIZABLE)

        winPos = winInfo.getWindowPosition()
        screenPos = winInfo.getScreenPosition()

        # Print interesting data!
        print "Window -",
        for key in winPos.keys():
            print "%s: %s"%(key, winPos[key]),
        print " |  Screen -",
        for key in screenPos.keys():
            print "%s: %s"%(key, screenPos[key]),
        print " |  Title thickness: %s"%winInfo.titleThickness,
        print " |  Border thickness: %s"%winInfo.borderThickness,
        print "\n",

        pygame.display.flip()

    pygame.quit()

Enjoy!