How to have gtk control+c to be handled, or not?

Question

I'm using pygtk, and would like to handle control+c sometimes to do a special copy action, but other times to let gtk handle it. For example, I'd like to put an object on my clipboard if it is available, or just let control+c be used in the normal fashion in a text entry.

Currently I have an ActionGroup associated with "c" but that always eats the keystroke, even if I return False. If I remove the ActionGroup, it always works in the text areas. If I add the ActionGroup, it always handles it, and copy doesn't work in the text areas.

What is the proper manner to have control+c appear in the menu, handle the keystroke sometimes, but other times, let it fall to a text widget?

Answer 1

I don't know if this is the "proper" way, but here is how I do it. I pass the application window as the user data parameter to the action callback. Then I find out which widget is focused in the window, and I pass the copy command on to that widget if that makes sense to do (i.e. the focused widget is a text entry like you say). If that doesn't make sense, then I copy from the window's 'default' text view.

void
action_copy(GtkAction *action, gpointer user_data)
{
    GtkWidget *widget = gtk_window_get_focus(GTK_WINDOW(user_data));

    /* What actually happens depends on the type of widget that is focused */
    if(WEBKIT_IS_WEB_VIEW(widget))
        webkit_web_view_copy_clipboard(WEBKIT_WEB_VIEW(widget));
    else if((GTK_IS_LABEL(widget) && gtk_label_get_selectable(GTK_LABEL(widget)))
        || GTK_IS_ENTRY(widget) || GTK_IS_TEXT_VIEW(widget))
        g_signal_emit_by_name(widget, "copy-clipboard", NULL);
    else
        g_signal_emit_by_name(/* ...default text view... */, "copy-clipboard", NULL);
}

(Obtaining the default text view is actually done by calling a get_default_view() method on my application class, which is a subclass of GtkWindow; but I didn't want to complicate matters here.)