CHAPTER 8
A tkinter Tour, Part 1
“Widgets and Gadgets and GUIs, Oh My!”
This chapter is a continuation of our look at GUI programming in Python. The previous
chapter used simple widgets—buttons, labels, and the like—to demonstrate the fun-
damentals of Python/tkinter coding. That was simple by design: it’s easier to grasp the
big GUI picture if widget interface details don’t get in the way. But now that we’ve seen
the basics, this chapter and the next move on to present a tour of more advanced widget
objects and tools available in the tkinter library.
As we’ll find, this is where GUI scripting starts getting both practical and fun. In these
two chapters, we’ll meet classes that build the interface devices you expect to see in
real programs—e.g., sliders, check buttons, menus, scrolled lists, dialogs, graphics, and
so on. After these chapters, the last GUI chapter moves on to present larger GUIs that
utilize the coding techniques and the interfaces shown in all prior GUI chapters. In
these two chapters, though, examples are small and self-contained so that we can focus
on widget details.This Chapter’s Topics
Technically, we’ve already used a handful of simple widgets in Chapter 7. So far we’ve
met Label, Button, Frame, and Tk, and studied pack geometry management concepts
along the way. Although all of these are basic, they represent tkinter interfaces in general
and can be workhorses in typical GUIs. Frame containers, for instance, are the basis of
hierarchical display layout.
In this and the following chapter, we’ll explore additional options for widgets we’ve
already seen and move beyond the basics to cover the rest of the tkinter widget set.
Here are some of the widgets and topics we’ll explore in this chapter:- Toplevel and Tk widgets
- Message and Entry widgets
- Checkbutton, Radiobutton, and Scale widgets
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