Displaying a message in the status bar

The status bar in QGIS displays a variety of information in all sorts of contexts. It can be used for static information such as the current project projection or for real-time scrolling information such as the mouse coordinates. In this recipe, we'll print the current time to the status bar.

Getting ready

Open the QGIS Python console by selecting the Plugins menu and then clicking on Python Console.

How to do it...

All we need to do is call the status bar message method with the current time:

1. First, we import the time module:

           import time 
   

2. Then, we call the showMessage() method of the status bar with the current time and date:

           iface.mainWindow().statusBar().showMessage(time.asctime()) 
   

How it works...

QGIS automatically places the message in an open space on the status bar. We placed a simple message in the status bar, but you can also add pretty much any other widget as well. The following screenshot shows the timestamp on the bottom...