Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints - Second Edition

By: Bhaskar Chaudhary

Overview of this book

Tkinter is the built-in GUI package that comes with standard Python distributions. It is a cross-platform package, which means you build once and deploy everywhere. It is simple to use and intuitive in nature, making it suitable for programmers and non-programmers alike. This book will help you master the art of GUI programming. It delivers the bigger picture of GUI programming by building real-world, productive, and fun applications such as a text editor, drum machine, game of chess, audio player, drawing application, piano tutor, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and much more. In every project, you will build on the skills acquired in the previous project and gain more expertise. You will learn to write multithreaded programs, network programs, database-driven programs, asyncio based programming and more. You will also get to know the modern best practices involved in writing GUI apps. With its rich source of sample code, you can build upon the knowledge gained with this book and use it in your own projects in the discipline of your choice.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Event unbinding and virtual events

In addition to the bind method that you previously saw, you might find the following two event-related options useful in certain cases:

  • Unbind: Tkinter provides the unbind option to undo the effect of an earlier binding. The syntax is as follows:
widget.unbind(event)

The following are some examples of its usage:

entry.unbind('<Alt-Shift-5>')
root.unbind_all('<F1>')
root.unbind_class('Entry', '<KeyPress-Del>')
  • Virtual events: Tkinter also lets you create your own events. You can give these virtual events any name that you want. For example, let's suppose that you want to create a new event called <<commit>>, which is triggered by the F9 key. To create this virtual event on a given widget, use the following syntax:
widget.event_add('<<commit>>', '<KeyRelease-F9>')

You can then bind <<commit>> to a callback by using a normal bind() method, as follows:

widget.bind('<<commit>>', callback)

Other event-related methods can be accessed by typing the following line in the Python Terminal:

>>> import tkinter
>>> help(tkinter.Event)

Now that you are ready to delve into real application development with Tkinter, let's spend some time exploring a few custom styling options that Tkinter offers. We will also have a look at some configuration options that are commonly used with the root window.