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Add a friendly front end with Tk

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2006-02-08 05:48:56 - Graham Ellis

With a Tk Graphic User Interface, you can add a friendly look and feel to an application running on your workstation if it's written in Tcl (Tcl/Tk), Perl (Perl/Tk) or Python (TkInter).

Whichever language you build your GUI on to, you'll want to remember

1. Create your components (known as widgets) as your application starts - you'll have buttons and labels and entry boxes and frames ... and associated with some of them such as the buttons you'll have commands that are to be run later on when the button is pressed

2. Use a geometry manager to position the widgets within the application window(s) and to define how they're to react when the window is resized

3. Define any extra events - things that are to happen when the user interacts with the GUI - in addition to the commands that you specified as you defined the components.

Once you've created the components, added extra events, and placed the components you can sit back and let the application run in what's known as the event loop. That's a loop - and it can be an infinite loop - that waits for the next event, and when it's received, you process it.


The source code of the example used to illustrate this item is only a few hundred bytes long and much of that is comments. You can view the source code if you wish.