Tkinter

The tkinter package (“Tk interface”) is the standard Python interface to the Tcl/Tk GUI toolkit. Both Tk and tkinter are available on most Unix platforms, including macOS, as well as on Windows systems. Running python -m tkinter from the command line should open a window demonstrating a simple Tk interface, letting you know that tkinter is properly installed on your system, and also showing what version of Tcl/Tk is installed, so you can read the Tcl/Tk documentation specific to that version. Tkinter supports a range of Tcl/Tk versions, built either with or without thread support. Tcl/Tk 8.5.12 is the minimum supported version; the official Python binary release bundles Tcl/Tk 8.6. See the source code for the tkinter module for more information about supported versions. Changed in version 3.11: Support for Tcl/Tk versions older than 8.5.12 was removed. Tkinter is not a thin wrapper, but adds a fair amount of its own logic to make the experience more pythonic. This documentation will concentrate on these additions and changes, and refer to the official Tcl/Tk documentation for details that are unchanged. Tcl/Tk 8.5 (2007) introduced a modern set of themed user interface components along with a new API to use them (see tkinter.ttk ). Both old and new APIs are still available. Most documentation you will find online still uses the old API and can be woefully outdated. Extensive tutorial on creating user interfaces with Tkinter. Explains key concepts, and illustrates recommended approaches using the modern API. Comprehensive reference to each of the underlying Tcl/Tk commands used by Tkinter. Tcl/Tk is not a single library but rather consists of a few distinct modules, each with separate functionality and its own official documentation. Python’s binary releases also ship an add-on module together with it. Tk is a Tcl package implemented in C that adds custom commands to create and manipulate GUI widgets. Each Tk object embeds its own Tcl interpreter instance with Tk loaded into it. Tk’s widgets are very customizable, though at the cost of a dated appearance. Tk uses Tcl’s event queue to generate and process GUI events. When your Python application uses a class in Tkinter, for example, to create a widget, the tkinter module first assembles a Tcl/Tk command string. It passes that Tcl command string to an internal tkinter binary module, which then calls the Tcl interpreter to evaluate it. The Tcl interpreter will then call into the Tk and/or Ttk packages, which will in turn make calls to Xlib, Cocoa, or GDI. Support for Tkinter is spread across several modules. Most applications will need the main tkinter module, as well as the tkinter.ttk module, which provides the modern themed widget set and API: Base class for the dialogs defined in the other modules listed here. Themed widget set introduced in Tk 8.5, providing modern alternatives for many of the classic widgets in the main tkinter module. Symbolic constants that can be used in place of strings when passing various parameters to Tkinter calls. Automatically imported by the main tkinter module. (experimental) Drag-and-drop support for tkinter . This will become deprecated when it is replaced with the Tk DND. The remainder of this section will help you to identify the classes, methods, and options you’ll need in your Tkinter application, and where to find more detailed documentation on them, including in the official Tcl/Tk reference manual. We’ll start by walking through a “Hello World” application in Tkinter. This isn’t the smallest one we could write, but has enough to illustrate some key concepts you’ll need to know. from tkinter import from tkinter import ttk root = Tk() frm = ttk.Frame(root, padding =10) frm.grid() ttk.Label(frm, text ="Hello World!").grid(column =0, row =0) ttk.Button(frm, text ="Quit", command =root.destroy).grid(column =1, row =0) root.mainloop() After the imports, the next line creates an instance of the Tk class, which initializes Tk