Question

I’m tring to add mutiline message to listbox using

wx.listbox.Append('part1 \r\n part2')

while on linux (gtk) im getting multiline box

on windows (msw) it just ignore the newline…

is there a way to get a similar functionality in windows?

Answer 1

The windows ListBox control doesn’t implement that behavior. While it allows drawing the item yourself and adjusting its height, wxWidgets doesn’t expose this functionality for the ListBox.
As an alternative, you could use the wx.SimpleHtmlListBox or derive from wx.HtmlListBox.

wxSimpleHtmlListBox is an implementation of wxHtmlListBox which shows HTML content in the listbox rows.

Unlike wxHtmlListBox, this is not an abstract class and thus it has the advantage that you can use it without deriving your own class from it. However, it also has the disadvantage that this is not a virtual control and thus it’s not well-suited for those cases where you need to show a huge number of items: every time you add/insert a string, it will be stored internally and thus will take memory.

It inherits from the ItemContainer just like wx.ListBox, so the usage is essentially the same. Keep in mind that you have to escape certain characters (as shown in the example). For that you could use cgi.escape.

import wx
import cgi

class MyFrame(wx.Frame):
    def __init__(self):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self,None)
        lb = wx.SimpleHtmlListBox(self)
        lb.Append( cgi.escape("foo <&> bar") )
        lb.Append("<b>Line 1</b> <br> Line 2")
        
app = wx.PySimpleApp()
frame = MyFrame().Show()
app.MainLoop()