Tk Tutorial - 4. Tk Concepts

Widgets

Widgets are all the things that you see onscreen. In our example, we had a button, an entry, a few labels, and a frame. Others are things like checkboxes, tree views, scrollbars, text areas, and so on. Widgets are what are often referred to as "controls"; you'll also often see them referred to as "windows", particularly in Tk's documentation, a holdover from its X11 roots (so under that terminology, both a toplevel window and things like a button would be called windows).

Each separate widget is a Python object. When creating a widget, you must pass its parent as a parameter to the widget creation function. The only exception is the "root" window, which is the toplevel window that will contain everything else. That is automatically created, and it does not have a parent.

Configuration Options

% python
>>> from tkinter import *
>>> from tkinter import ttk
>>> root = Tk()
create a button, passing two options:
>>> button = ttk.Button(root, text="Hello", command="buttonpressed")
>>> button.grid()
check the current value of the text option:
>>> button['text']
'Hello'
change the value of the text option:
>>> button['text'] = 'goodbye'
another way to do the same thing:
>>> button.configure(text='goodbye')
check the current value of the text option:
>>> button['text']
'goodbye'
get all information about the text option:
>>> button.configure('text')
('text', 'text', 'Text', '', 'goodbye')
get information on all options for this widget:
>>> button.configure()
{'cursor': ('cursor', 'cursor', 'Cursor', '', ''), 'style': ('style', 'style', 'Style', '', ''), 
'default': ('default', 'default', 'Default', <index object at 0x00DFFD10>, <index object at 0x00DFFD10>), 
'text': ('text', 'text', 'Text', '', 'goodbye'), 'image': ('image', 'image', 'Image', '', ''), 
'class': ('class', '', '', '', ''), 'padding': ('padding', 'padding', 'Pad', '', ''), 
'width': ('width', 'width', 'Width', '', ''), 
'state': ('state', 'state', 'State', <index object at 0x0167FA20>, <index object at 0x0167FA20>), 
'command': ('command', 'command' , 'Command', '', 'buttonpressed'), 
'textvariable': ('textvariable', 'textVariable', 'Variable', '', ''), 
'compound': ('compound', 'compound', 'Compound', <index object at 0x0167FA08>, <index object at 0x0167FA08>), 
'underline': ('underline', 'underline', 'Underline', -1, -1), 
'takefocus': ('takefocus', 'takeFocus', 'TakeFocus', '', 'ttk::takefocus')}

Geometry Management

In our example, this positioning was accomplished by the"grid" command,

The geometry manager will ask each slave widget for its natural size, or how large it would ideally like to be displayed.It then takes that information and combines it with any parameters provided by the program when it asks the geometrymanager to manage that particular slave widget. In our example, we passed grid a"column" and"row" number for each widget,which indicated the relative position of the widget with respect to others, and also a"sticky" parameter to suggesthow the widget should be aligned or possibly stretched. We also used"columnconfigure" and "rowconfigure" to indicatethe columns and rows we'd like to have expand if there is extra space available in the window. Of course, all theseparameters are specific to grid; other geometry managers would use different ones.

Event Handling

Command Callbacks

For those events that are pretty much essential to customize (what good is a button without somethinghappening when you press it?), the widget will provide acallback as a widget configuration option.We saw this in the example with the"command" option of the button.

Event Bindings

For events that don't have a command callback associated with them, you can use Tk's "bind" to capture any event, and then (like with callbacks) execute an arbitrary piece of code.

from tkinter import *
from tkinter import ttk
root = Tk()
l =ttk.Label(root, text="Starting...")
l.grid()
l.bind('<Enter>', lambda e: l.configure(text='Moved mouse inside'))
l.bind('<Leave>', lambda e: l.configure(text='Moved mouse outside'))
l.bind('<1>', lambda e: l.configure(text='Clicked left mouse button'))
l.bind('<Double-1>', lambda e: l.configure(text='Double clicked'))
l.bind('<B3-Motion>', lambda e: l.configure(text='right button drag to %d,%d' % (e.x, e.y)))
root.mainloop()

from: http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/concepts.html