Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints

By : Bhaskar Chaudhary
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints

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, media player, drawing application, chat application, screen saver, port scanner, and many 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 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 (15 chapters)
Tkinter GUI Application Development Blueprints
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Managing user preferences


A very common theme in several GUI programs involves letting the user set the program's preferences.

For example, what if we want users to be able to customize the chessboard colors? What if we want users to select colors and once selected, it is saved as a user preference and it is loaded the next time the program is run? Let's implement this as a feature.

Python offers a standard module called configparser that lets us save user preferences. Let's see the configparser module in action.

To begin with, import the ConfigParser class from the configparser module in the configurations.py file, as follows (see code 4.07):

from configparser import ConfigParser

The configparser module uses the .ini files to store and read the configuration values. The file consists of one or more named sections. These sections contain individual options with names and values.

To illustrate this, let's create a file called chess_options.ini in the project's root folder (see code 4.07). The file...