Clickable hyperlinks

[Michael Torrie]

On 01/03/2017 08:28 PM, Deborah Swanson wrote:
> I think you're making this too complicated. I meant a console in a GUI
> application.

Ahh. Well, a "console in a GUI application" is whatever you make it[1].
There's no single "GUI console" hence my confusion and the confusion
expressed by the other poster.  I was under the impression you are
talking about printing something to standard out with, for example,
print().  Is this so, or are you using a GUI toolkit to construct your
application.  What GUI toolkit are you using?  As I said, in Qt or GTK
there are various ways to display hyperlinks.  For example, Qt lets you
place a hyperlink in a form, or inside of a text entry/display widget.

I still get the impression that you're working with standard out, using
print(). If so, then no, there's not going to be a way to force the OS
to make the output clickable, at least on Windows.

> Not true. Pycharm uses links in it's console output, they just aren't
> internet links. They link back to lines of code being referred to.

I think the problem here is the terminology with specific meaning in
Windows and Linux.  I'm referring to either the Win32 console window
(which is where cmd.exe runs), or a terminal emulator in Linux, which is
where you can interact with the bash shell and run command-line
programs.  When people normally run python apps that are not graphical,
they normally do it from the Windows console (via cmd.exe) or in Linux
from Bash running in a terminal emulator.  Graphical apps do their own
thing as far as displaying data and making windows with clickable links
in them.

[1] PyCharm and IDLE make "console" windows that are really normal GUI
windows and they direct the output from Python apps there. They may also
choose to display clickable links for things like errors. But once the
app is run outside of PyCharm, the output of the app would go to either
a Windows console window, or a terminal in Linux.  If you wanted your
app to make it's own window and display clickable links, you're back to
looking at a GUI toolkit (which is what PyCharm and IDLE are built with)
like Qt, GTK, Tk, wxWidgets, or something else.