Pyside - Select all text when QLineEdit gets focus

pyside, python, qlineedit, qt

Solution

With `focusInEvent`, when you click the widget, it gets executed, but since you click, it removes the selected text.

To overcome this, we must use the `mousePressEvent`, this can be done two ways:

import sys
from PySide.QtGui import QLineEdit, QApplication, QVBoxLayout, QWidget
class MyLineEdit(QLineEdit):
    def __init__(self, parent=None):
        super(MyLineEdit, self).__init__(parent)

    def mousePressEvent(self, e):
        self.selectAll()      

app = QApplication(sys.argv)
top = QWidget()
layout = QVBoxLayout()
layout.addWidget(MyLineEdit())
layout.addWidget(MyLineEdit())
top.setLayout(layout)
top.show()
app.exec_()

Or you can do it by simply overriding the base `QLineEdit` class:

txt_demo = QtGui.QLineEdit()
txt_demo.mousePressEvent = lambda _ : txt_demo.selectAll()

However, since we are modifying the `mousePressEvent`, whenever you try to click text, it will always select all first.

Problem

Original source