new user building desktopish app

[Jerry S]

Hi,

I am building a desktop style app and was looking at kivy as the engine. I really like some of the basic ideas in kivy and am willing to put some effort into seeing if I can make it work. This is my first try with kivy, so I have a bunch of questions. I also want to do a shout out to the "crash course" videos, those helped immensely.

I have a few selectors and a properties box on the left, then I have a vertical stack of boxes on the right. The boxes start off as empty, then get things selected from the left side and "inserted" into the boxes on the right. I think I know how to the basics of building all these, but there are a bunch of questions:

Is there a widget that I can have a repeating monochrome tile of texture as a background? These are simple hashing patterns like you would see with a CAD program. I want the texture to always be in screen coordinate space (not stretch) and replicate in both directions to fill the box. I also would like to set the color of the hashing pattern in the program.

The more challenging part is how to do the typical selection of boxes in the box stack. I want to be able to select a set of boxes as a range, then get a context menu and make the changes to the set at once. The standard selection methods would be click and drag the mouse over a set or select one, hold shift and then click the other end of the range. Control click toggles the selection on a given box. How do I do something like this in kivy?

One final thing for now. Is there an include function in the .kv file? I have to describe a whole lot of contextual menus and I want them at the top, so it would be this huge blob of description at the top of the file and make it much harder to understand the main part of the kv file.

thanks in advance,

jerry