In Turtle, by default, we have an arrowhead-shaped cursor for drawing on the canvas. This can be changed to some other predefined shape or we can also create a custom shape and register it under a name. Not just that, we can even use gif format images to replace our cursor.
Changing cursor to predefined shapes
The shape() function is used to set the shape of the cursor. The pre-defined shapes include turtle, arrow, circle, square and triangle.
Python3
import turtle# turtle objectc_turtle = turtle.Turtle() # changing the cursor# shape to circlec_turtle.shape('circle') |
Registering new shapes
The turtle module has register_shape() function for registering custom shapes.
Syntax : turtle.register_shape(name, shape)
Parameters :
- name : a string- the name of the shape to be registered.
- shape : a tuple of tuples containing the coordinates for the custom shape.
The n-tuple argument for the shape parameter, denotes the relative position of each corner of an n-sided polygon. Let us try to create a simple diamond shape to understand this.
Consider this diamond, having length of diagonal = 20, in a Cartesian plane :
To create this shape, we need to pass these coordinates in clockwise order.
Python3
import turtle# turtle objectdiamond_turtle = turtle.Turtle()# the coordinates of each cornershape = ((0, 0), (10, 10), (20, 0), (10, -10))# registering the new shapeturtle.register_shape('diamond', shape)# changing the shape to 'diamond'diamond_turtle.shape('diamond')# Keep the turtle window openturtle.done() |
Output:
Using images for Turtle cursor
To use an image as the cursor, we need to pass the image file path as parameter to register_shape(). Note that this image has to be in gif format.
Python3
import turtle# turtle objectimg_turtle = turtle.Turtle() # registering the image# as a new shapeturtle.register_shape('example.gif')# setting the image as cursorimg_turtle.shape('example.gif') |
