Programming Python, 3rd Edition

Tkinter Overview

Of all these GUI options, though, Tkinter is by far the de facto standard way to implement portable user interfaces in Python today, and the focus of this part of the book. The rationale for this approach was explained in Chapter 2; in short, we have elected to present one toolkit in satisfying depth instead of many toolkits in less-than-useful fashion. Most of the Tkinter programming concepts you learn here will translate directly to any other GUI toolkit you choose to utilize.

Tkinter Pragmatics

Perhaps more to the point, though, there are pragmatic reasons that the Python world still gravitates to Tkinter as its de facto standard portable GUI toolkit. Among them, Tkinter’s accessibility, portability, availability, documentation, and extensions have made it the most widely used Python GUI solution for many years running:

Accessibility

Tkinter is generally regarded as a lightweight toolkit and one of the simplest GUI solutions for Python available today. Unlike larger frameworks, it is easy to get started in Tkinter right away, without first having to grasp a much larger class interaction model. As we’ll see, programmers can create simple Tkinter GUIs in a few lines of Python code and scale up to writing industrial-strength GUIs gradually. Although the Tkinter API is basic, additional widgets can be coded in Python or obtained in extension packages such as Pmw and Tix (described later).

Portability

A Python script that builds a GUI with Tkinter will run without source ...