Python 3 – Tkinter Menu
Python is well-known for its versatility and user-friendly interface. Its graphic user interface (GUI) capabilities make it a popular choice for desktop applications. One of the main advantages Python offers is the Tkinter library that provides developers with the tools to create interactive and attractive UI. In this article, we’ll be discussing how to create Menus in Python 3 using Tkinter.
What is a Menu?
A menu is a graphical user interface element that allows users to interact with an application by selecting options from a list of choices. Menus can be used to provide easy access to frequently used functions and features in applications. Menus can be used for a lot of things, like creating a file, saving a file, or exiting an application.
Creating a Menu
Creating menus in Python 3 using Tkinter is a straightforward process. The first step is to import the necessary libraries.
from tkinter import *
Once the library is imported, we can create a window and then create the menu.
window = Tk()
menu = Menu(window)
window.config(menu=menu)
In the above code, we have created a window using the Tk() constructor provided by Tkinter. After that, we have created a menu object from the Menu() constructor provided by Tkinter. We then set the menu using the config()
function provided by Tkinter.
We can now add the items we want in our menu. There are two types of menu items: a menu item with a drop-down list (also called a cascading menu), and a menu item without a drop-down list.
file_menu = Menu(menu)
file_menu.add_command(label="New")
file_menu.add_command(label="Open")
file_menu.add_command(label="Save")
file_menu.add_command(label="Exit")
menu.add_cascade(label="File", menu=file_menu)
window.mainloop()
The above code creates a cascading menu object by using the add_cascade()
function. We then add four items in the file_menu object using the add_command()
function. The label
parameter is the text that will appear on the menu item. Finally, we have attached the file_menu object to the main menu object.
By executing the above code, we get a window with a File menu that has four options: New, Open, Save, and Exit. Now, let’s add more options to our menu.
edit_menu = Menu(menu)
edit_menu.add_command(label="Undo")
edit_menu.add_command(label="Redo")
menu.add_cascade(label="Edit", menu=edit_menu)
about_menu = Menu(menu)
about_menu.add_command(label="About")
menu.add_cascade(label="About", menu=about_menu)
window.mainloop()
We have added another cascading menu object named edit_menu with two options, Undo and Redo. We then attached the edit_menu object to the main menu object. Additionally, we have added an “About” menu item with a single “About” option, attached to the main menu object.
Our program now has three options in the main menu: File, Edit, and About. The File menu contains four options, Edit contains two options, and About contains one option.
Conclusion
Creating menus in Python 3 using Tkinter library is a simple yet powerful tool that developers can use to make their applications look much better. We learned how to add a menu, create a cascading menu, and add options to the menus, and this knowledge can be further extended to build more advanced GUI applications. I hope this article has been helpful in implementing menus in your Python 3 projects. Happy coding!