Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

By : Alan D. Moore
4.5 (2)
Book Image

Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, 2nd edition - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Alan D. Moore

Overview of this book

Tkinter is widely used to build GUIs in Python due to its simplicity. In this book, you’ll discover Tkinter’s strengths and overcome its challenges as you learn to develop fully featured GUI applications. Python GUI Programming with Tkinter, Second Edition, will not only provide you with a working knowledge of the Tkinter GUI library, but also a valuable set of skills that will enable you to plan, implement, and maintain larger applications. You’ll build a full-blown data entry application from scratch, learning how to grow and improve your code in response to continually changing user and business needs. You’ll develop a practical understanding of tools and techniques used to manage this evolving codebase and go beyond the default Tkinter widget capabilities. You’ll implement version control and unit testing, separation of concerns through the MVC design pattern, and object-oriented programming to organize your code more cleanly. You’ll also gain experience with technologies often used in workplace applications, such as SQL databases, network services, and data visualization libraries. Finally, you’ll package your application for wider distribution and tackle the challenge of maintaining cross-platform compatibility.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
19
Other Books You May Enjoy
20
Index
Appendices

Styling Tkinter widgets

Tkinter has essentially two styling systems: the old Tkinter widgets system, and the newer Ttk system. Although we are using Ttk widgets wherever possible, there are still situations where regular Tkinter widgets are required, so it's good to know both systems. Let's take a look first at the older Tkinter system and apply some styling to the Tkinter widgets in our application.

Widget color properties

As you saw in Chapter 1, Introduction to Tkinter, basic Tkinter widgets allow you to change two color values: the foreground color, meaning mainly the color of text and borders, and the background color, meaning the rest of the widget. These can be set using the foreground and background arguments, or their aliases, fg and bg.

For example, we can set the colors of a label like so:

# tkinter_color_demo.py
import tkinter as tk
l = tk.Label(text='Hot Dog Stand!', fg='yellow', bg='red')

The values for the...