Python GUI Programming With Tkinter

Adding a Widget

Now that you have a window, you can add a widget. Use the tk.Label class to add some text to a window. Create a Label widget with the text "Hello, Tkinter" and assign it to a variable called greeting:

>>> greeting = tk.Label(text="Hello, Tkinter")

The window you created earlier doesn’t change. You just created a Label widget, but you haven’t added it to the window yet. There are several ways to add widgets to a window. Right now, you can use the Label widget’s .pack() method:

>>> greeting.pack()

The window now looks like this:

When you pack a widget into a window, Tkinter sizes the window as small as it can be while still fully encompassing the widget. Now execute the following:

>>> window.mainloop()

Nothing seems to happen, but notice that no new prompt appears in the shell.

window.mainloop() tells Python to run the Tkinter event loop. This method listens for events, such as button clicks or keypresses, and blocks any code that comes after it from running until you close the window where you called the method. Go ahead and close the window you’ve created, and you’ll see a new prompt displayed in the shell.

Creating a window with Tkinter only takes a couple of lines of code. But blank windows aren’t very useful! In the next section, you’ll learn about some of the widgets available in Tkinter, and how you can customize them to meet your application’s needs.

Check Your Understanding

Expand the code blocks below to check your understanding:

Exercise: Create a Tkinter windowShow/Hide

Write a full Python script that creates a Tkinter window with the text "Python rocks!".

The window should look like this:

Try this exercise now.

You can expand the code block below to see a solution:

import tkinter as tk

window = tk.Tk()
label = tk.Label(text="Python rocks!")
label.pack()

window.mainloop()

When you’re ready, you can move on to the next section.

Displaying Text and Images With Label Widgets

Label widgets are used to display text or images. The text displayed by a Label widget can’t be edited by the user. It’s for display purposes only. As you saw in the example at the beginning of this tutorial, you can create a Label widget by instantiating the Label class and passing a string to the text parameter:

label = tk.Label(text="Hello, Tkinter")

Label widgets display text with the default system text color and the default system text background color. These are typically black and white, respectively, but you may see different colors if you’ve changed these settings in your operating system.

You can control Label text and background colors using the foreground and background parameters:

label = tk.Label(
    text="Hello, Tkinter",
    foreground="white",  # Set the text color to white
    background="black"  # Set the background color to black
)

There are numerous valid color names, including:

• "red"
• "orange"
• "yellow"
• "green"
• "blue"
• "purple"

Many of the HTML color names work with Tkinter. For a full reference, including macOS- and Windows-specific system colors that the current system theme controls, check out the colors manual page.

You can also specify a color using hexadecimal RGB values:

label = tk.Label(text="Hello, Tkinter", background