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Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook

By : Alejandro Rodas de Paz

4.4 (7)

Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook

4.4 (7)

By: Alejandro Rodas de Paz

Overview of this book

As one of the more versatile programming languages, Python is well-known for its batteries-included philosophy, which includes a rich set of modules in its standard library; Tkinter is the library included for building desktop applications. Due to this, Tkinter is a common choice for rapid GUI development, and more complex applications can benefit from the full capabilities of this library. This book covers all of your Tkinter and Python GUI development problems and solutions. Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook starts with an overview of Tkinter classes and at the same time provides recipes for basic topics, such as layout patterns and event handling. Next, we cover how to develop common GUI patterns, such as entering and saving data, navigating through menus and dialogs, and performing long-running actions in the background.You can then make your apps leverage network resources effectively and perform graphical operations on a canvas and related tasks such as detecting collisions between items. Finally, this book covers using themed widgets, an extension of Tk widgets that have a more native look and feel. Finally, this book covers using the canvas and themed widgets. By the end of the book, you will have an in-depth knowledge of Tkinter classes, and will know how to use them to build efficient and rich GUI applications.

Preface

Preface

Who this book is for

What this book covers

To get the most out of this book

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Getting Started with Tkinter

Getting Started with Tkinter

Introduction

Structuring a Tkinter application

Working with buttons

Creating text entries

Tracing text changes

Validating a text entry

Selecting numerical values

Creating selections with radio buttons

Implementing switches with checkboxes

Displaying a list of items

Handling mouse and keyboard events

Setting the main window's icon, title, and size

Window Layout

Window Layout

Introduction

Grouping widgets with frames

Using the Pack geometry manager

Using the Grid geometry manager

Using the Place geometry manager

Grouping inputs with the LabelFrame widget

Dynamically laying out widgets

Creating horizontal and vertical scrollbars

Customizing Widgets

Customizing Widgets

Introduction

Working with colors

Setting widget fonts

Using the options database

Changing the cursor icon

Introducing the Text widget

Adding tags to the Text widget

Dialogs and Menus

Dialogs and Menus

Introduction

Showing alert dialogs

Asking for user confirmation

Choosing files and directories

Saving data into a file

Creating a menu bar

Using variables in menus

Displaying context menus

Opening a secondary window

Handling window deletion

Passing variables between windows

Object-Oriented Programming and MVC

Object-Oriented Programming and MVC

Introduction

Structuring our data with a class

Composing widgets to display information

Reading records from a CSV file

Persisting data into a SQLite database

Refactoring using the MVC pattern

Asynchronous Programming

Asynchronous Programming

Introduction

Scheduling actions

Running methods on threads

Performing HTTP requests

Connecting threads with a progress bar

Canceling scheduled actions

Handling idle tasks

Spawning separate processes

Canvas and Graphics

Canvas and Graphics

Introduction

Understanding the coordinate system

Drawing lines and arrows

Writing text on a canvas

Adding shapes to the canvas

Finding items by their position

Moving canvas items

Detecting collisions between items

Deleting items from a canvas

Binding events to canvas items

Rendering a canvas into a PostScript file

Themed Widgets

Themed Widgets

Introduction

Replacing basic widget classes

Creating an editable drop-down with Combobox

Using the Treeview widget

Populating nested items in a Treeview

Displaying tabbable panes with Notebook

Applying Ttk styling

Creating a datepicker widget

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Setting the main window's icon, title, and size

The Tk instance differs from normal widgets in the way that it is configured, so we will explore some basic methods that allow us to customize how it is displayed.

How to do it...

This snippet creates a main window with a custom title and icon. It has 400px of width by 200px of height, with a separation of 10px in each axis to the upper-left corner of the screen:

import tkinter as tk 
 
class App(tk.Tk): 
    def __init__(self): 
        super().__init__() 
        self.title("My Tkinter app") 
        self.iconbitmap("python.ico") 
        self.geometry("400x200+10+10") 
 
if __name__ == "__main__": 
    app = App() 
    app.mainloop()

This program assumes that you have a valid ICO file called python.ico in the same directory where the script is placed and executed.

How it works...

The methods title() and iconbitmap() of the Tk class are very self-descriptive—the first one sets the window title, whereas the second one takes the path to the icon that is associated to the window.

The geometry() method configures the size of the window with a string that follows the following pattern:

{width}x{height}+{offset_x}+{offset_y}

In case you add more secondary windows to your application, these methods are also available in the Toplevel class.

There's more...

If you want to make the application fullscreen, replace the call to the geometry() method with self.state("zoomed").

Visually different images

CONTINUE READING

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Tech Concepts

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