Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By : Alan D. Moore
Book Image

Python GUI programming with Tkinter

By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a lightweight, portable, and easy-to-use graphical toolkit available in the Python Standard Library, widely used to build Python GUIs due to its simplicity and availability. This book teaches you to design and build graphical user interfaces that are functional, appealing, and user-friendly using the powerful combination of Python and Tkinter. After being introduced to Tkinter, you will be guided step-by-step through the application development process. Over the course of the book, your application will evolve from a simple data-entry form to a complex data management and visualization tool while maintaining a clean and robust design. In addition to building the GUI, you'll learn how to connect to external databases and network resources, test your code to avoid errors, and maximize performance using asynchronous programming. You'll make the most of Tkinter's cross-platform availability by learning how to maintain compatibility, mimic platform-native look and feel, and build executables for deployment across popular computing platforms. By the end of this book, you will have the skills and confidence to design and build powerful high-end GUI applications to solve real-world problems.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Styling Tkinter widgets


Tkinter has essentially two styling systems: the old Tkinter widgets system, and the newer Ttk system. Since we still need to work with both Tkinter and Ttk widgets, we'll have to look at both systems. Let's take a look first at the older Tkinter system and apply some styling to the Tkinter widgets in our application.

Widget color properties

Basic Tkinter widgets allow you to change two colors: foreground, meaning mainly the text and borders, and background, meaning the rest of the widget. These can be set using the foreground and background arguments, or their aliases fg and bg.

This example shows the use of colors on a Label:

l = tk.Label(text='Hot Dog!', fg='yellow', bg='red')

The values for the colors can be color name strings or CSS-style RGB hex strings.

For example, this code produces the same effect:

l2 = tk.Label(text='Also Hot Dog!',
              foreground='#FFFF00',
              background='#FF0000')

There are over 700 named colors recognized by Tkinter, roughly...