Category: gui

wxPython menu

Most desktop applications have a window menu. They may look different depending the operating system.

wxPython will make every desktop application look like a native app. If you want the same appearance on every platform consider using another GUI framework.

wxPython menu

The code below will create a menubar in your wxPython window:

#!/usr/bin/python
 
import wx
 
app = wx.App()
 
frame = wx.Frame(None, -1, 'win.py')
frame.SetDimensions(0,0,200,50)
 
# Setting up the menu.
filemenu= wx.Menu()
filemenu.Append(101, "Open", "Open")
filemenu.Append(102, "Save", "Save")
filemenu.Append(wx.ID_ABOUT, "About","About")
filemenu.Append(wx.ID_EXIT,"Exit","Close")
 
# Creating the menubar.
menuBar = wx.MenuBar()
menuBar.Append(filemenu,"File") # Adding the "filemenu" to the MenuBar
frame.SetMenuBar(menuBar)  # Adding the MenuBar to the Frame content.
frame.Show()
 
app.MainLoop()

A menu in wxPython is simple a wx.MenuBar().

This menu alone will not do anything, it needs to have several sub-menus such as a File menu. A sub-menu can be created with wx.Menu() which in turn has several items.

Finally, we set the frame’s menubar to the menubar we created.

wxPython has some default ids such as wx.ID_ABOUT and wx.ID_EXIT, which are both just integers. You can define your own ids as we did (101, 102).

While we did not heavily use object orientation for the wxPython series yet for simplicity reasons, we cannot go around it. In this tutorial you will learn how to create a tab interface with wxPython.

The class Mainframe creates the frame as we did in the previous examples. The other classes are the contents of the tabs. We create a panel and notebook (tab holder) in the main frame. Then we create tab objects :

tab1 = TabOne(nb)
tab2 = TabTwo(nb)
...

which we attach to the tab holder using:

nb.AddPage(tab1, "Tab 1")
nb.AddPage(tab2, "Tab 2")
...

Full code:

import wx
 
# Define the tab content as classes:
class TabOne(wx.Panel):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent)
        t = wx.StaticText(self, -1, "This is the first tab", (20,20))
 
class TabTwo(wx.Panel):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent)
        t = wx.StaticText(self, -1, "This is the second tab", (20,20))
 
class TabThree(wx.Panel):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent)
        t = wx.StaticText(self, -1, "This is the third tab", (20,20))
 
class TabFour(wx.Panel):
    def __init__(self, parent):
        wx.Panel.__init__(self, parent)
        t = wx.StaticText(self, -1, "This is the last tab", (20,20))
 
 
class MainFrame(wx.Frame):
    def __init__(self):
        wx.Frame.__init__(self, None, title="wxPython tabs example @pythonspot.com")
 
        # Create a panel and notebook (tabs holder)
        p = wx.Panel(self)
        nb = wx.Notebook(p)
 
        # Create the tab windows
        tab1 = TabOne(nb)
        tab2 = TabTwo(nb)
        tab3 = TabThree(nb)
        tab4 = TabFour(nb)
 
        # Add the windows to tabs and name them.
        nb.AddPage(tab1, "Tab 1")
        nb.AddPage(tab2, "Tab 2")
        nb.AddPage(tab3, "Tab 3")
        nb.AddPage(tab4, "Tab 4")
 
        # Set noteboook in a sizer to create the layout
        sizer = wx.BoxSizer()
        sizer.Add(nb, 1, wx.EXPAND)
        p.SetSizer(sizer)
 
 
if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = wx.App()
    MainFrame().Show()
    app.MainLoop()

Output:

Tk menubar

The Tkinter toolkit comes with all the basic widgets to create graphical applications. Almost every app has a main menu. As expected, Tkinter supports adding a main menu to your application window.

The screenshot below demonstrates a Tkinter based menu:

Related course

Python Desktop Apps with Tkinter

Tkinter menubar

You can create a simle menu with Tkinter using the code below. Every option (new, open, save.. ) should have its own callback.

from Tkinter import *
 
def donothing():
   x = 0
 
root = Tk()
 
menubar = Menu(root)
filemenu = Menu(menubar, tearoff=0)
filemenu.add_command(label="New", command=donothing)
filemenu.add_command(label="Open", command=donothing)
filemenu.add_command(label="Save", command=donothing)
filemenu.add_separator()
filemenu.add_command(label="Exit", command=root.quit)
menubar.add_cascade(label="File", menu=filemenu)
 
helpmenu = Menu(menubar, tearoff=0)
helpmenu.add_command(label="Help Index", command=donothing)
helpmenu.add_command(label="About...", command=donothing)
menubar.add_cascade(label="Help", menu=helpmenu)
 
root.config(menu=menubar)
root.mainloop()

We create the menubar with the call:

menubar = Menu(root)

where root is a Tk() object.

A menubar may contain zero or more submenus such as the file menu, edit menu, view menu, tools menu etcetera.

A submenu can be created using the same Menu() call, where the first argument is the menubar to attach to.

filemenu = Menu(menubar, tearoff=0)
menu = Menu(menubar, tearoff=0)

Individual options can be added to these submenus using the add_command() method:

filemenu.add_command(label="New", command=donothing)
filemenu.add_command(label="Open", command=donothing)
filemenu.add_command(label="Save", command=donothing)

In the example we created the callback function donothing() and linked every command to it for simplicity. An option is added using the add_comment() function. We call add_cascade() to add this menu list to the specific list.

Tk widgets

Tkinter has several widgets including:

Label
EditText
Images
Buttons (Discussed before)

In this article we will show how to use some of these Tkinter widgets. Keep in mind there’s a slight difference between Tkinter for Python 2.x and 3.x

Related course

Python Desktop Apps with Tkinter

Label
To create a label we simply call the Label() class and pack it. The numbers padx and pady are the horizontal and vertical padding.

from Tkinter import *
 
root = Tk()
root.title('Python Tk Examples @ pythonspot.com')
Label(root, text='Python').pack(pady=20,padx=50)
 
root.mainloop()

EditText (Entry widget)
To get user input you can use an Entry widget.

from Tkinter import *
 
root = Tk()
root.title('Python Tk Examples @ pythonspot.com')
 
var = StringVar()
textbox = Entry(root, textvariable=var)
textbox.focus_set()
textbox.pack(pady=10, padx=10)
 
root.mainloop()

Result:

Images
Tk has a widget to display an image, the PhotoImage. It is quite easy to load an image:

from Tkinter import *
import os
 
root = Tk()
img = PhotoImage(file="logo2.png")
panel = Label(root, image = img)
panel.pack(side = "bottom", fill = "both", expand = "yes")
root.mainloop()

Result:

GUI editor
An overview of Tkinter GUI editors can be found here: http://wiki.tcl.tk/4056

TkInter message box

The Tkinter tkMessageBox has various methods to display a message box.

There is a slight difference between Tkinter for Python 2.7 and Python 3.
To find your Python version try one of these commands:

python --version
python3 --version

Related courses

Python Desktop Apps with Tkinter

Tkinter Message box

To show a minimalistic Tkinter message box, use the function showinfo() where the parameters are the window title and text.

The showinfo() function is in a different module depending on the Python version.

Python 3.x

from tkinter import messagebox
 
messagebox.showinfo("Title", "a Tk MessageBox")

Python 2.7

import Tkinter
import tkMessageBox
 
tkMessageBox.showinfo("Title", "a Tk MessageBox")

Tkinter showerror, showwarning and showinfo

Tkinter includes several other message boxes:

showerror()
showwarning()
showinfo()

Python 3.x

import tkinter
from tkinter import messagebox
 
# hide main window
root = tkinter.Tk()
root.withdraw()
 
# message box display
messagebox.showerror("Error", "Error message")
messagebox.showwarning("Warning","Warning message")
messagebox.showinfo("Information","Informative message")

Python 2.7

import Tkinter
import tkMessageBox
 
# An error box
tkMessageBox.showerror("Error","No disk space left on device")
 
# A warning box 
tkMessageBox.showwarning("Warning","Could not start service")
 
# An information box
tkMessageBox.showinfo("Information","Created in Python.")

You may like: Tkinter Question Dialog or More Tkinter

Tkinter tkFileDialog module

tkFileDialog is a module with open and save dialog functions.
Instead of implementing those in Tkinter GUI on your own.

Related courses

Python Desktop Apps with Tkinter

Overview
An overview of file dialogs:

Function	Parameters	Purpose
.askopenfilename	Directory, Title, Extension	To open file: Dialog that requests selection of an existing file.
.asksaveasfilename	Directory, Title, Extension)	To save file: Dialog that requests creation or replacement of a file.
.askdirectory	None	To open directory

Tkinter Open File

The askopenfilename function to creates an file dialog object. The extensions are shown in the bottom of the form (Files of type). The code below will simply show the dialog and return the filename. If a user presses cancel the filename is empty. On a Windows machine change the initialdir to “C:\”.

Python 2.7 version:

from Tkinter import *from Tkinter import *
import Tkinter, Tkconstants, tkFileDialog
 
root = Tk()
root.filename = tkFileDialog.askopenfilename(initialdir = "/",title = "Select file",filetypes = (("jpeg files","*.jpg"),("all files","*.*")))
print (root.filename)

Python 3 version:

from tkinter import filedialog
from tkinter import *
 
root = Tk()
root.filename =  filedialog.askopenfilename(initialdir = "/",title = "Select file",filetypes = (("jpeg files","*.jpg"),("all files","*.*")))
print (root.filename)

Here is an example (on Linux):

Tkinter Save File

The asksaveasfilename function prompts the user with a save file dialog.

Python 2.7 version

from Tkinter import *
import Tkinter, Tkconstants, tkFileDialog
 
root = Tk()
root.filename = tkFileDialog.asksaveasfilename(initialdir = "/",title = "Select file",filetypes = (("jpeg files","*.jpg"),("all files","*.*")))
print (root.filename)

Python 3 version

from tkinter import filedialog
from tkinter import *
 
root = Tk()
root.filename =  filedialog.asksaveasfilename(initialdir = "/",title = "Select file",filetypes = (("jpeg files","*.jpg"),("all files","*.*")))
print (root.filename)

Tkinter Open Directory

The askdirectory presents the user with a popup for directory selection.

Python 2.7 version

from  Tkinter import *
import Tkinter, Tkconstants, tkFileDialog
root = Tk()
root.directory = tkFileDialog.askdirectory()
print (root.directory)

tkinter-askdirectory — tkinter askdirectory

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wxPython menu

Tkinter menubar

Tkinter Message box

Tkinter showerror, showwarning and showinfo

Tkinter Open File

Tkinter Save File

Tkinter Open Directory

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