Tkinter GUI Application

Development l+ TSHOT

Develop exciting and engaging GUI applications in Python

and Tkinter by working on 10 real-world applications

Bhaskar Chaudhary

[ PUBLISHING
]
BIRMINGHAM-MUMBAI
 Table of Contents

Preface 1

Project 1: Meet Tkinter 7

Mission Briefing 7
The root window -

your drawing board 10

Widgets -

building blocks for your GUI program 13

Getting to know core Tkinter widgets 16
Geometry management 19
Events and callbacks -
adding life to programs 28
Doing it in
style 36
Mission Accomplished 41
A Hotshot Challenge 42

Project 2: Making a Text Editor like Notepad 43

Mission Briefing 43
Setting up the widgets 45
Leveraging the power of built-in Text widget options 51
Indexing and tagging 52

Working with forms and dialogs 59

Working with message boxes 64
The icon toolbar and View menu functions 67
Event handling and the context menu 74
Mission Accomplished 76
A Hotshot Challenge 76
Table of Contents

Project 3: Programmable Drum Machine 77

Mission Briefing 77

Setting up the GUI in OOP 79

Completing the pattern editor 85

Loading drum samples 88

Playing the drum machine 91

Tkinter and threading 94
More beat patterns 97

Object persistence 102

ttk-themed widgets 106
Mission Accomplished 112
A Hotshot Challenge 113

Project 4: Game of Chess 115

Mission Briefing 115

Structuring our program 117

Structuring chessboard-and-pieces-related data 123

Adding pieces on the board 130

Enforcing rules for pieces' movement 133

The chessboard logic 138

Making the chess functional 140

Adding menu and an info frame 150

Mission Accomplished 153

A Hotshot Challenge 153

Project 5: Audio Player 155

Mission Briefing 155

Getting the audio to play 158

Adding a playlist 163

Adding more controls to the player 169

Adding the top display console 173

Looping over tracks 179

Adding the contextual menu 182

Adding a tooltip and finalizing our player 184

Mission Accomplished 187

A Hotshot Challenge 188

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 Table of Contents

Project 6: Drawing an Application 189

Mission Briefing 189
Developing a bare bone GUI framework 191

Structuring drawing program

our 196
Handling mouse events 202
Drawing items on the canvas 205

Setting the options toolbar at the top 209

Adding some more features 214
Mission Accomplished 220
A Hotshot Challenge 221

Project 7: Some Fun Project Ideas 223

Mission Briefing 223
Building a screen saver 224
Building a Snake game 229

Creating a WeatherReporter 239

Creating a phonebook application 245
Graphing with Tkinter 252
Mission Accomplished 257
A Hotshot Challenge 257

Appendix A: Miscellaneous Tips 259

Mission Briefing 259
Tracing Tkinter variables 260
Widget traversal 262
Validating user input 263
Formatting widget data 269

More on fonts 271

Working with Unicode characters 275

Tkinter class's hierarchy 278

Custom-made mixins 281
Tips for code cleanup and program optimization 283

Distributing the Tkinter application 287

Limitations of Tkinter 289
Alternatives to Tkinter 290

Getting interactive help 292

Tkinter in Python 3.x 293

Conclusion 294

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Table of Contents

Appendix B: Quick Reference Sheets 297

Options common to widgets 297
Widget-specific options 300
The pack manager 301
The grid manager 302
The place manager 304
The event types 305
The event modifiers 306
The event details 306
Other event-related methods 308
List of available cursors 310
The basic widget methods 311
ttk widgets 320
The Toplevel window methods 325

Index 331

-DD