4/9/2018  Shortly, wikipython will announce an awesome real-time resource for students and occasional users of tkinter. A completely free, open source, uncomplicated python program called tksidekick.  The third version is in the hands of beta testers now. It will be explained here on wikipython, but just like our toolboxes you will download the program from GitHub for safety. By the way – just common sense – you should never run a program you download without having your anti-virus check it out.

You run tksidekick “on the side” while you are writing tkinter code and, for the most part, it pulls information out of your system about widgets and commands and objects of any sort.  Click on a button that says “Listbox”, for example, and it instantly shows all the Options and their attributes (viewed 3 ways) and all the methods that apply to that widget.  You can quickly see all the wifo commands, the window manager command, the constants in your system, and even run color chooser which will leave behind the color formula you need.  You can search for any type of Python or tkinter object two ways.  You can see all the pydoc topics, select and read the ones you choose.

The biggest thing not pulled directly is a short code segment for each widget that shows an example of the widget being used – instantiated. (tksidekick requires Python 3.6 because it uses f strings for list formatting.) These “messy” segments are kept in a dictionary and have been carefully constructed and tested. They are presented when/if you ask for them. These segments assume a header that sets up a tkinter workspace and an ending mainloop(). We suggest what we use, which you will find at “ARITCLES RANTS ETC.” -> “2 Standard GUI Test Setups”.

The instantiation code included in tksidekick is on a page under Examples. We couldn’t wait. You can’t believe how excited we are about getting this tool into your hands. We think it will change the way many see and think about tkinter.