How to alight and place ipywidgets

Question

Is there a way to control the placement and alignment of ipywidgets (inside jupyter notebook)?

from ipywidgets import widgets
from IPython.display import Javascript, display
event_type_ui = widgets.Text(value='open', description='Test Event')
platform_ui = widgets.Text(value='Android', description='Control Event')
display(event_type_ui)
display(platform_ui)

I would like to specify an offset (in pixels?) to allow the label to fit and to have two controls aligned vertically.

Answer 1

The layout and styling documentation for ipywidgets says:

Every Jupyter interactive widget has a layout attribute exposing a number of css properties that impact how widgets are laid out.

I was able to coax it into aligning the labels:

from ipywidgets import Text, HBox, VBox, Box from IPython.display import display widget1 = Text(value='Cats', description='Test Event', layout='margin-right:5px') widget2 = Text(value='Oranges', description='Another Test Event') widget1.width = '200px' widget2.width = '150px' display(VBox([widget1, widget2]))

to produced this:

But in general, I doesn't seem like we can directly target layout properties of the description label, just the entire widget itself.

Answer 2

The ipywidgets also have an add_class that can be used for getting into the weeds when you really need it:

import ipywidgets as widgets
from IPython.display import display, HTML
widget_list={}
for label in ("longish description","brief"):
    widget_list[label]=widgets.Text(description=label)
    widget_list[label].add_class("balanced-text")

display(HTML("<style>div.balanced-text .widget-label {max-width:200px; width:200px}</style>"))
display(widgets.VBox(list(widget_list.values())))

Answer 3

After some fiddling, I was able to get this:

Before:

After:

Here is a copy-paste snippet, if interested:

from ipywidgets import widgets
from IPython.display import Javascript, display

align_kw = dict(
    _css = (('.widget-label', 'min-width', '20ex'),),
    margin = '0px 0px 5px 12px'
)
platform_ui = widgets.Dropdown(description = 'platform',options=['iPhone','iPad','Android'], **align_kw)
event_type_ui = widgets.Text(value='open', description='Test Event', **align_kw)
os_version_ui = widgets.Text(value='iOS9', description='Operating System', **align_kw)
refresh_ui = widgets.Checkbox(description='Force Refresh', **align_kw)

display(platform_ui,event_type_ui,os_version_ui,refresh_ui)