Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook

By : Alejandro Rodas de Paz
Book Image

Tkinter GUI Application Development Cookbook

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.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Creating a menu bar

Complex GUIs typically use menu bars to organize the actions and navigations that are available in our application. This pattern is also used to group operations that are closely related, such as the File menu included in most text editors.

Tkinter natively supports these menus, which are displayed with the look and feel of the target desktop environment. Therefore, you do not have to simulate them with frames or labels, because you would lose the cross-platform features that have already been built into Tkinter.

Getting ready

We will start by adding a menu bar to a root window with a nested drop-down menu. On Windows 10, this is displayed as follows:

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