Mastering GUI Programming with Python

Adding a status bar

A status bar is a strip across the bottom of the application window designed for displaying short text messages and informational widgets. In Qt, a status bar is a QStatusBar object that we can assign to the main window's statusBar property.

We could create one like this:

        status_bar = qtw.QStatusBar()        self.setStatusBar(status_bar)        status_bar.showMessage('Welcome to text_editor.py')

However, there's no need to go to so much trouble; the QMainWindow object's statusBar() method automatically creates a new status bar if there isn't one, or returns the existing one if there is.

So, we can reduce all that code to this:

        self.statusBar().showMessage('Welcome to text_editor.py')

The showMessage() method does exactly what it says, ...