Mastering GUI Programming with Python

Using icons

Now consider an icon on a toolbar or in a program menu. When the menu item is disabled, you expect the icon to be grayed out in some way. Likewise, if a user hovers over the button or item using a mouse cursor, you might expect it to be highlighted. To encapsulate this type of state-dependent image display, Qt provides the QIcon class. A QIcon object contains a collection of pixmaps that are each mapped to a widget state.

Here is how you can create a QIcon object:

        connect_icon = qtg.QIcon()        connect_icon.addPixmap(go_pixmap, qtg.QIcon.Active)        connect_icon.addPixmap(stop_pixmap, qtg.QIcon.Disabled)

After creating the icon object, we use its addPixmap() method to assign a QPixmap object to a widget state. These states include