Tkinter is a Python binding to the Tk GUI toolkit. It is the standard Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit, and is Python's de facto standard GUI. Tkinter is included with standard Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS installs of Python. The name Tkinter comes from Tk interface. Tkinter was written by Steen Lumholt and Guido van Rossum, then later revised by Fredrik Lundh. Tkinter is free software released under a Python license.

Description

As with most other modern Tk bindings, Tkinter is implemented as a Python wrapper around a complete Tcl interpreter embedded in the Python interpreter. Tkinter calls are translated into Tcl commands, which are fed to this embedded interpreter, thus making it possible to mix Python and Tcl in a single application. There are several popular GUI library alternatives available, such as Kivy, Pygame, Pyglet, PyGObject, PyQt, PySide, and wxPython.

Some definitions

Window

This term has different meanings in different contexts, but in general it refers to a rectangular area somewhere on the user's display screen.

Top-level window

A window which acts as a child of the primary window. It will be decorated with the standard frame and controls for the desktop manager. It can be moved around the desktop and can usually be resized.

Widget

The generic term for any of the building blocks that make up an application in a graphical user interface.

Frame

In Tkinter, the Frame widget is the basic unit of organization for complex layouts. A frame is a rectangular area that can contain other widgets.

Child and parent

When any widget is created, a parent–child relationship is created. For example, if you place a text label inside a frame, the frame is the parent of the label.

A minimal application

Here is a minimal Python 3 Tkinter application with one widget: For Python 2, the only difference is the word "tkinter" in the import command will be capitalized to "Tkinter".

Process

There are four stages to creating a widget These are often compressed, and the order can vary.

Simple application

Using the object-oriented paradigm in Python, a simple program would be (requires Tcl version 8.6, which is not used by Python on MacOS by default):