Step by Step Guide to Creating a GUI App using Tkinter

Tkinter is a standard GUI (Graphical User Interface) package in Python, that comes with the Python standard library. It is simple to use and makes it easy to create GUI applications. In this tutorial, we will learn how to create a GUI app with Tkinter in a step-by-step manner.

Step 1: Install Tkinter
First, make sure you have Tkinter installed on your machine. Tkinter comes pre-installed with Python, so you don’t need to install anything extra.

Step 2: Import Tkinter
To create a GUI app with Tkinter, you first need to import the Tkinter library. This can be done by adding the following line at the top of your Python script:

import tkinter as tk

Step 3: Create the main window
The main window in a Tkinter GUI application is known as the root window. You can create the root window by instantiating an object of the ‘Tk’ class from the tkinter module as shown below:

root = tk.Tk()

Step 4: Add widgets to the window
Now that we have created the main window, we can start adding widgets to it. Widgets are the basic building blocks of a GUI application, such as buttons, labels, text boxes, etc.

For example, let’s add a label widget to the root window:

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

The pack() method is used to display the label widget on the window.

Step 5: Run the main loop
Finally, we need to run the main loop of the Tkinter application. This loop listens for events from the user, such as mouse clicks and keyboard inputs. You can start the main loop by calling the mainloop() method on the root window object:

root.mainloop()

This will keep the GUI application running until the user closes the main window.

Putting it all together, here is the complete code for a simple Tkinter GUI application that displays a label saying "Hello, Tkinter!":

import tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()

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

root.mainloop()

Run this code in your Python environment, and you should see a window pop up with the label "Hello, Tkinter!" displayed in it.

Congratulations! You have successfully created your first GUI app with Tkinter. From here, you can further explore Tkinter’s capabilities and build more complex GUI applications by adding different widgets and functionalities. Happy coding!