I am now looking for 2 volunteers to beta test tksidekick 3 and give me feedback. If you would like to help, send your name and email to me at oakey.john@yahoo.com. All information from all responses will be absolutely confidential forever. You should be well on your way to learning tkinter or an irregular user who could use occasional refreshing. Remember: Python 3.6 (uses f strings) and tkinter most recent version.

There were no failures reported for version one and only one glitch in version 2,  but many suggestions from a fairly small number of respondents. To paraphrase Mae West, so many suggestions and so little time

In version 3:

Everything previously in “Help” moves to “About” and “Help” becomes a really AWESOME new aid for not only tkinter but for Python in general.  Have attacked this problem by going to the source and using additional modules for some functions while twisting a couple of functions to go beyond their intended purpose.

In the second version:

(1) a Help menu option has been added to hold the vocabulary and an about,
(2) the top panel display has an “instantiate” command that displays a few lines of possible code to coach a newer user in creating a new widget – could be improved I know,
(3) the bottom panel has an option to display a list of Python and tkinter constants it finds on your system – I do not pretend to understand how many of these are used. For example, what circumstance would create a need for RADIOBUTTON = “radiobutton”? If it was “Radiobutton” I might get it.
(4) the display in columns algorithm has been significantly improved – but not as much as I would like. After a lot of research it appears the “.measure” function in the current version of tkinter is broken. This led me to make 2 “iffy” assumptions in the code: (1) the user is not going to change the standard tkinter font, size or weight and (2) a seat-of-the-pants estimate for the average number of characters can be used with reasonable accuracy is calculating the number of columns that can be displayed.

 

—posted about a month ago – no longer current info except the last paragraph—

I would love to find someone running Python and tkinter on a Mac to try it and give feedback. The program is going to be distributed for free, so if you know someone willing to help please share the py file and my email.

Previously the big fail was in being able to capture and print the text from the help() text object that comes from an interactive help() request. Yes, I have redirected input, re-encoded the data, tried odd configurations of pydoc and even found an obscure undocumented command in the gc module that worked in grabbing part of it. Nothing really worked well enough to use.

I continue to be astounded at the lack of comprehensive documentation on tkinker and the occasional Python module “secret” that you can find documented only in one obscure note on stackoverflow or some such.