Configuration file

Pympress has a number of options available from its configuration file.

This file is usually located in:

  • ~/.config/pympress on Linux,

  • %APPDATA%/pympress.ini on Windows,

  • ~/Library/Preferences/pympress on macOS,

  • in the top-level of the pympress install directory for portable installations.

The path to the currently used configuration file can be checked in the Help > About information window.

Shortcuts

The shortcuts are parsed using Gtk.accelerator_parse():

The format looks like “<Control>a” or “<Shift><Alt>F1” or “<Release>z” (the last one is for key release).

The parser is fairly liberal and allows lower or upper case, and also abbreviations such as “<Ctl>” and “<Ctrl>”. Key names are parsed using Gdk.keyval_from_name(). For character keys the name is not the symbol, but the lowercase name, e.g. one would use “<Ctrl>minus” instead of “<Ctrl>-”.

This means that any value in this list of key constants is valid (removing the initial Gdk.KEY_ part). You can verify that this value is parsed correctly from the Help > Shortcuts information window.

Layouts

The panes (current slide, next slide, notes, annotations, etc.) can be rearranged arbitrarily by setting the entries of the layout section in the configuration file. Here are a couple examples of layouts, with Cu the current slide, No the notes half of the slide, Nx the next slide:

  • All-horizontal layout:

    +----+----+----+
| Cu | No | Nx |
+----+----+----+

    Setting:

    notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}

  • All-vertical layout:

    +----+
| Cu |
+----+
| No |
+----+
| Nx |
+----+

    Setting:

    notes = {"children": ["current", "notes", "next"], "proportions": [0.33, 0.33, 0.33], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}

  • Vertical layout with horizontally divided top pane:

    +----+----+
| Cu | No |
+----+----+
|    Nx   |
+---------+

    Setting:

    notes = {"children": [
  			{"children": ["current", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true},
  			"next"
  		], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}

  • Horizontal layout with horizontally divided right pane:

    +----+----+
|    | Nx |
+ Cu +----+
|    | No |
+---------+

    Setting:

    notes = {"children": [
  			"current",
  			{"children": ["next", "notes"], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "vertical", "resizeable": true}
  		], "proportions": [0.5, 0.5], "orientation": "horizontal", "resizeable": true}

And so on. You can play with the items, their nesting, their order, and the orientation in which a set of widgets appears.

For each entry the widgets (strings that are leaves of “children” nodes in this representation) must be:

  • for notes: “current”, “notes”, “next”

  • for plain: “current”, “next” and “annotations” (the annotations widget is toggled with the A key by default)

  • for highlight: same as plain with “highlight” instead of “current”

A few further remarks:

  • If you set “resizeable” to false, the panes won’t be resizeable dynamically with a handle in the middle

  • “proportions” are normalized, and saved on exit if you resize panes during the execution. If you set them to 4 and 1, the panes will be 4 / (4 + 1) = 20% and 1 / (4 + 1) = 100%, so the ini will contain something like 0.2 and 0.8 after executing pympress.

Themes on Windows

Pympress uses the default Gtk theme of your system, which makes it easy to change on many OSs either globally via your Gtk preferences or per application. Here’s the way to do it on windows:

  1. Install a theme

    There are 2 locations, either install the theme for all your gtk apps, e.g. in C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\themes, or just for pympress, so in %INSTALLDIR%\share\themes (for me that’s C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\Programs\pympress\share\themes)

    Basically pick a theme e.g. from this list of dark themes and make sure to unpack it in the selected directory, it needs at least %THEMENAME%\gtk-3.0\gtk.css and %THEMENAME%\index.theme, where THEMENAME is the name of the theme.

    There are 2 pitfalls to be aware of, to properly install a theme:

    • themes that are not self-contained (relying on re-using css from default linux themes that you might not have), and

    • linux links (files under gtk-3.0/ that point to a directory above and that need to be replaced by a directory containing the contents of the target directory that has the same name as the link file).

  2. Set the theme as default

    Create a settings.ini file, either under C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Local\gtk-3.0 (global setting) or %INSTALLDIR%\etc\gtk-3.0 (just pympress) and set the contents:

    [Settings]
gtk-theme-name=THEMENAME

Here’s what it looks like with the Obscure-Orange theme. VirtualBox_Win64_16_05_2021_01_23_19

In testing this found these 2 stackoverflow questions useful: