Tkinter Life Preserver

Contents

• Introduction
• Credits
• How To Use This Manual
• Overview
  • A Simple Hello World Program
  • An Overview of The Tkinter Classes
  • A (Very) Quick Look at Tcl/Tk
  • Mapping Basic Tk into Tkinter
  • How Tk and Tkinter are Related
• Handy Reference
  • Setting Options
  • The Packer
  • Coupling Widget Variables
  • The Window Manager
  • Tkinter Options Table
  • Tk Option Data Types
  • Bindings and Events
  • The index Parameter
  • The Tkinter Widget Class Interfaces

Choices

• Button
• Radiobutton
• Checkbutton
• Menubutton
• Menu

Text Entry and Display

• Label
• Message
• Entry
• Listbox
• Text

Graphics, Containers and Controls

• Canvas
• Frame
• Scale
• Scrollbar

Geometry Managers

• Packer
• Placer

System and Miscellaneous

• Tk
• Toplevel
• Widget
• Wm
• Miscellaneous

Introduction

Tkinter is a Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit. This document is not designed to be an exhaustive tutorial on either Tk or Tkinter. Rather, it is intended as a stop gap, providing some introductory orientation on the system. Hopefully, it will also help to answer programmers questions, when they need something more useful than "read the source code.''

This manual assumes that you are familiar with the Python programming language and that you have access to the Tk toolkit man pages.

Credits

• Tkinter was written by Steen Lumholt and Guido van Rossum (the inventor of the Python programming language).
• Tk was written by John Ousterhout while at Berkeley, now at Sun Microsystems.
• This manual was written by Matt Conway at the University of Virginia. Many thanks go to Tommy Burnette, Shuichi Koga, Joe Shochet, and Richard Stoakley, for their excellent suggestions regarding the format and content of this document. Special thanks go to Joe Shochet for helping to produce Tkinter example programs.
• This html rendering, and some liberal editing, was produced from a FrameMaker version by Ken Manheimer, with the sketchy assistance of Quadralay WebWorks HTML Lite 1.5.1.
• Fredrik Lundh elaborated and revised the class interface descriptions, to get them current with Tk 4.2.

How To Use This Manual

This manual is designed in two parts: the first half (roughly) covers background material, while the second half can be taken to the keyboard as a handy reference.

When trying to answer questions of the form ``how do I do blah'', it is often best to find out how to do "blah" in straight Tk, and then convert this back into the corresponding Tkinter call. Steen Lumholt has done an admirable job in keeping the correspondence between Tk and Tkinter close, so that Python programmers can often guess at the correct Python command by looking at the Tk documentation. This means that in order to use Tkinter, you will have to know a little bit about Tk. This document can't fulfill that role, so the best we can do is point you to the best documentation that exists. Here are some hints:

• The authors strongly suggest getting a copy of the Tk man pages. Specifically, the man pages in the "mann" directory are most useful. The "man3" man pages describe the C interface to the Tk library and thus are not especially helpful for script writers.
• There is a collection of example tkinter programs that show very basic tkinter operations. This collection is dynamic and we appreciate any suggestions you might have for programs to include. For people who would like one-stop shopping, the authors have made this document and the associated example files available to Guido van Rossum for inclusion at the official Python FTP site.
• Addison-Wesley publishes a book called Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by John Ousterhout (ISBN 0-201-63337-X) which is a good introduction to Tcl and Tk for the novice. The book is not exhaustive, and for many details, it defers to the man pages.
• Tkinter.py is a last resort for most, but can be a good place to go when nothing else makes sense.