Programming Python, 3rd Edition

“Python, Open Source, and Camaros”

This chapter concludes our look at building GUIs with Python and its standard Tkinter library, by presenting a collection of realistic GUI programs. In the preceding four chapters, we met all the basics of Tkinter programming. We toured the core set of widgets—Python classes that generate devices on a computer screen and respond to user events—and we studied a handful of advanced GUI programming techniques. Here, our focus is on putting those widgets and techniques together to create more useful GUIs. We’ll study:

PyEdit

A text editor program

PyPhoto

A thumbnail photo viewer

PyView

An image slideshow

PyDraw

A painting program

PyClock

A graphical clock

PyToe

A simple tic-tac-toe game, just for fun^[*]

As in Chapters 6 and 7, I’ve pulled the examples in this chapter from my own library of Python programs that I really use. For instance, the text editor and clock GUIs that we’ll meet here are day-to-day workhorses on my machines. Because they are written in Python and Tkinter, they work unchanged on my Windows and Linux machines, and they should work on Macs too.

Since these are pure Python scripts, their future evolution is entirely up to their users—once you get a handle on Tkinter interfaces, changing or augmenting the behavior of such programs by editing their Python code is a snap. Although some of these examples are similar to commercially available programs (e.g., PyEdit is reminiscent of the Windows Notepad accessory), the portability and almost infinite ...