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

Exploring Tkinter widgets


When we designed our application, we picked out a widget class that most closely matched each field we needed. These were the Entry, Spinbox, Combobox, Checkbutton, and Text widgets. We also determined that we'd need the Button and LabelFrame widgets to implement the application layout. Before we start writing our class, let's take a look at each of these widgets.

Note

Some of our widgets are in Tkinter, others are in the ttk themed widget set, and a few are in both libraries. We prefer the ttk versions wherever they exist, since they look better across platforms. Pay careful attention to the library from which we import each widget.

The Entry widget

The ttk.Entry widget is a basic, one-line character entry, as shown in the following screenshot:

You can create an entry by executing the following code:

my_entry = ttk.Entry(parent, textvariable=my_text_var)

In the preceding code, the commonly used arguments to ttk.Entry are as follows:

  • parent: This argument sets the parent...