Drawing on Canvas

Generic drawing is done on a Canvas. You control what appears on this canvas by defining a draw function:

using Gtk, Graphics
c = @GtkCanvas()
win = @GtkWindow(c, "Canvas")
@guarded draw(c) do widget
    ctx = getgc(c)
    h = height(c)
    w = width(c)
    # Paint red rectangle
    rectangle(ctx, 0, 0, w, h/2)
    set_source_rgb(ctx, 1, 0, 0)
    fill(ctx)
    # Paint blue rectangle
    rectangle(ctx, 0, 3h/4, w, h/4)
    set_source_rgb(ctx, 0, 0, 1)
    fill(ctx)
end
show(c)

This draw function will get called each time the window gets resized or otherwise needs to refresh its display.

canvas

See Julia's standard-library documentation for more information on graphics.

Errors in the draw function can corrupt Gtk's internal state; if this happens, you have to quit julia and start a fresh session. To avoid this problem, the @guarded macro wraps your code in a try/catch block and prevents the corruption. It is especially useful when initially writing and debugging code. See further discussion about when @guarded is relevant.

Finally, Canvases have a field called mouse that allows you to easily write callbacks for mouse events:

c.mouse.button1press = @guarded (widget, event) -> begin
    ctx = getgc(widget)
    set_source_rgb(ctx, 0, 1, 0)
    arc(ctx, event.x, event.y, 5, 0, 2pi)
    stroke(ctx)
    reveal(widget)
end

This will draw a green circle on the canvas at every mouse click. Resizing the window will make them go away; they were drawn on the canvas, but they weren't added to the draw function.

Note the use of the @guarded macro here, too.