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

Summary


In this chapter we have learned all about menus. There are many different ways in which the flexible Menu widget can be utilized, and we have practiced three.

We first created a main menu bar along the top of our application where we could provide access to functions of the editor. Afterwards we added menus into this bar by creating a cascade. This gave us File, Edit, Tools, and Help menus sitting at the top of our editor. We also looked at a solution that allows these items to auto-populate with functions and keyboard shortcuts providing we follow a naming convention for our editor's methods.

Finally, we created a separate right-click context menu. This allows the user to manipulate the text in our TextArea widget without having to know the keyboard shortcuts or move the mouse all the way to the top of the screen.

In order to create these Menus we learned about the two main ways of adding items—add_command and add_cascade. We saw that add_cascade allows us to create a submenu inside...