Programming Python, Second Edition

Chapter 9. Larger GUI Examples

“Building a Better Mouse Trap”

This chapter continues our look at building graphical user interfaces with Python and its standard Tkinter library by presenting a collection of realistic GUI programs. In the previous three chapters, we met all the basics of Tkinter programming and toured the core set of widgets -- Python classes that generate devices on a computer screen and may reply to user-generated events like mouseclicks. Here, our focus is on putting those widgets together to create more useful GUIs. We’ll study:

• Advanced GUI coding techniques

• PyEdit -- a text editor program

• PyView -- an image slideshow

• PyDraw -- a painting program

• PyClock -- a graphical clock

• PyToe -- and even a simple game just for fun^[67]

As in Chapter 4, and Chapter 5, 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 both my Windows and Linux machines, and they should work on Macs, too.

And 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), ...