How to stop Tkinter Message widget from resizing?
Tkinter is a powerful tool for creating graphical user interfaces (GUI) in Python. One of the most commonly used widgets in Tkinter is the Message widget. The Message widget is used to display messages and other important information in the GUI application. However, by default, the Message widget resizes itself to fit the length of the text. In some cases, this behavior can be disruptive, especially if we want to set a fixed width for the Message widget. In this article, we will learn how to stop the Tkinter Message widget from resizing.
The Problem
Let’s start by creating a simple Tkinter application that contains a Message widget with some text:
import tkinter as tk
root = tk.Tk()
msg = tk.Message(root, text="This is a long text for the Message widget.")
msg.pack()
root.mainloop()
When we run this code, the Message widget will resize itself to fit the length of the text. This behavior can be a problem if we want to set a specific width for the Message widget.
import tkinter as tk
root = tk.Tk()
msg = tk.Message(root, text="This is a long text for the Message widget.", width=200)
msg.pack()
root.mainloop()
In this case, even if we set the width of the Message widget to 200, the widget will still resize itself to fit the length of the text.
The Solution
To solve this problem, we need to override the Message
class’ _configure
method. The _configure
method is called every time there is a change in the Message widget’s configuration. We will replace the default _configure
method with our own method that will set the width of the Message widget to the specified width.
import tkinter as tk
class CustomMessage(tk.Message):
def __init__(self, master=None, cnf={}, **kw):
tk.Message.__init__(self, master=None, **kw)
self.width = kw.get('width', 0)
def _configure(self, *args):
tk.Message._configure(self, *args)
if self.width > 0:
self.configure(width=self.width)
root = tk.Tk()
msg = CustomMessage(root, text="This is a long text for the Message widget.", width=200)
msg.pack()
root.mainloop()
In the code above, we have created a custom Message widget called CustomMessage
. The CustomMessage
widget inherits from the Message widget, and overrides the _configure
method.
In the CustomMessage
widget’s constructor, we initialize the width
attribute to the value of the width argument that was passed in.
In the _configure
method, we call the _configure
method of the Message widget. This is important because it updates the widget’s configuration with the new values that were passed in.
If the width
attribute is greater than 0, we set the width of the Message widget to the value of the width
attribute.
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned how to stop the Tkinter Message widget from resizing. We did this by creating a custom Message widget that overrides the _configure
method to set a fixed width for the widget.
With this knowledge, we can create more customized Tkinter applications that have a fixed width for the Message widget, making them more visually appealing.