Graphical user interfaces with Tk¶

Tk/Tcl has long been an integral part of Python. It provides a robust and platform independent windowing toolkit, that is available to Python programmers using the tkinter package, and its extension, the tkinter.ttk module.

The tkinter package is a thin object-oriented layer on top of Tcl/Tk. To use tkinter, you don’t need to write Tcl code, but you will need to consult the Tk documentation, and occasionally the Tcl documentation. tkinter is a set of wrappers that implement the Tk widgets as Python classes.

tkinter’s chief virtues are that it is fast, and that it usually comes bundled with Python. Although its standard documentation is weak, good material is available, which includes: references, tutorials, a book and others. tkinter is also famous for having an outdated look and feel, which has been vastly improved in Tk 8.5. Nevertheless, there are many other GUI libraries that you could be interested in. The Python wiki lists several alternative GUI frameworks and tools.