Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Book Image

Tkinter GUI Programming by Example

Overview of this book

Tkinter is a modular, cross-platform application development toolkit for Python. When developing GUI-rich applications, the most important choices are which programming language(s) and which GUI framework to use. Python and Tkinter prove to be a great combination. This book will get you familiar with Tkinter by having you create fun and interactive projects. These projects have varying degrees of complexity. We'll start with a simple project, where you'll learn the fundamentals of GUI programming and the basics of working with a Tkinter application. After getting the basics right, we'll move on to creating a project of slightly increased complexity, such as a highly customizable Python editor. In the next project, we'll crank up the complexity level to create an instant messaging app. Toward the end, we'll discuss various ways of packaging our applications so that they can be shared and installed on other machines without the user having to learn how to install and run Python programs.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Adding syntax highlighting to our text editor


Let's recap a bit and plan our next action before diving back into our text editor application.

We know that in order to add syntax highlighting, we will need to change the color of certain words which are considered keywords within the Python programming language. In order to change their colors, we must apply a tag to the range at which they appear within the Text widget.

Tkinter's indexing system is now familiar to us. We know that the general syntax is line number, full stop, and character number, and some special strings also exists which reduce the need to use mathematical calculations upon those numbers. This means we know exactly how to format the ranges to add our tags to.

In order to locate each range, the search method can be used to locate matches of provided words giving us the beginning index of a range, and we can use a special string +nc to make finding the end even easier.

In order to find every instance of a keyword match, we have...