GUI programming : a first look at TKinter

Tkinter is the standard GUI library for Python and the good news its already available so no extra packages to install here.

Tkinter provides an interface to the Tk GUI toolkit.

Creating a GUI application using Tkinter is extremely straightforward.

First of all you just import the Tkinter module.
Then you create the main window of your GUI.
You then add the widgets your require to the GUI application. We will show you a list of available widgets later on in this article
Enter the main event loop to take action against each event, such as a user clicking on a button or interacting with a widget like a checkbox, slider, scrollbar etc.

In previous versions of Python you would do the import like this

import Tkinter

I am using Python 3.8.2 so the expected import is all in lowercase now like

import tkinter

This is just something to be aware of depending on which version of Python you have installed or plan to installed

Lets look at the most basic example which simply displays an empty window

#!/usr/bin/python
​
import tkinter
top = tkinter.Tk()
top.mainloop()

Save this as tkinter1.py, open a command prompt and run it like python tkinter1.py. This is what you should see. I adjusted the window below the command prompt.

Tkinter Widgets

Now a blank window is all good and well but as you know most of the functionality of an application usually lies in the controls that can be added such as buttons, text boxes, check boxes and labels to display text. These are known as widgets in tkinter

Here are a list of the widgets you can use

We will look at some of these widgets in future articles

Here is a taster for another simple GUI example

from tkinter import *

class Application(Frame):
def hello(self):
print ("hello world, I'm tkinter")

def createGUI(self):
#a button with red text on a black background 
#that says EXIT that quits the app
self.QUIT = Button(self)
self.QUIT["text"] = "EXIT"
self.QUIT["fg"] = "yellow"
self.QUIT["bg"] = "black"
self.QUIT["command"] = self.quit
self.QUIT.pack({"side": "left"})
#a button that will say the contents of hello on
#the comamnd line
self.hi_there = Button(self)
self.hi_there["text"] = "Hello",
self.hi_there["command"] = self.hello
self.hi_there.pack({"side": "left"})

def __init__(self, master=None):
Frame.__init__(self, master)
self.pack()
self.createGUI()

root = Tk()
app = Application(master=root)
app.mainloop()
root.destroy()

Save that as tkinter2.py , open a command prompt and run using python tkinter.py, this is what you should see