Tkinter, short for Tk interface, is a cross-platform Python interface for the Tk GUI toolkit. Tkinter provides a thin layer on Python while Tk provides the graphical widgets. Tkinter is a cross-platform library and gets deployed as part of Python installation packages for major operating systems. For Mac OS X 10.9, Tkinter is installed with the default Python framework. For Windows, when you install Python from the installation file, Tkinter gets installed with it.

Tkinter is designed to take minimal programming efforts for developing graphical applications, while also being powerful enough to provide support for the majority of GUI application features. If required, Tkinter can also be extended with plugins. Tkinter via Tk offers an operating system's natural look and feel after the release of Tk Version 8.0.

To test your current version of the Tk toolkit, use the following commands on the Python prompt:

>>> import Tkinter
>>> Tkinter._test...