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

Changing the syntax highlighting


As you may remember from the previous chapter, syntax highlighting is defined in a .yaml file stored in a folder named languages. We want to allow the user to easily define their own syntax highlighting keywords and schemes by simply creating another .yaml file.

To experiment with this feature, create yourself a .yaml file in the languages folder. Ensure it contains numbers, strings, and any other category of keywords you like.

If you want to, you can copy this small example for SQL:

categories:
  keywords:
    color: orange
    matches: [select, where, and, from, order, by, group]

  dangerous:
    color: red4
    matches: [set, update, drop, replace]

numbers:
  color: purple

strings:
  color: red

Now that we have another syntax highlighting file to test with we can write a method to load it:

def load_syntax_highlighting_file(self):
    syntax_file = filedialog.askopenfilename(filetypes=[("YAML file",
                             ("*.yaml", "*.yml"))])
   ...