Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Python GUI Development Options

Before we start wading into the Tkinter pond, let’s begin with some perspective on Python GUI options in general. Because Python has proven to be such a good match for GUI work, this domain has seen much activity in recent years. In fact, although Tkinter is the most widely used GUI toolkit in Python, there are a variety of ways to program user interfaces in Python today. Some are specific to Windows or X Windows,^[*] some are cross-platform solutions, and all have followings and strong points of their own. To be fair to all the alternatives, here is a brief inventory of GUI toolkits available to Python programmers as I write these words:

Tkinter

An open source GUI library and the continuing de facto standard for portable GUI development in Python. Python scripts that use Tkinter to build GUIs run portably on Windows, X Windows (Unix and Linux), and Macintosh (both classic and OS X), and they display a native look-and-feel on each of these. Tkinter makes it easy to build simple and portable GUIs quickly. Moreover, it can be easily augmented with Python code, as well as with larger extension packages such as Pmw (a third-party widget library), Tix (another widget library, and now a standard part of Python), and PIL (an image-processing extension).

The underlying Tk library used by Tkinter is a standard in the open source world at large and is also used by the Perl, Ruby, PHP, and Tcl scripting languages, giving it a user base that numbers in the millions. ...