Tkinter ŌĆō How to Create Colored Lines Based on Length?
In this tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create colored lines in Tkinter based on their length. It’s a neat trick that you can use to add some pizzazz to your GUI applications. We’ll start with a brief overview of TKinter and move on to the code.
What is Tkinter?
Tkinter is a Python standard library for creating graphical user interface (GUI) applications. It provides a set of tools and widgets for building desktop applications that are easy to use and visually appealing. Tkinter is built on top of the Tk toolkit, which is a cross-platform GUI toolkit written in Tcl.
Creating Colored Lines in Tkinter
To create colored lines in Tkinter, we’re going to use the Canvas
widget. The Canvas
widget is used to draw shapes and graphics on the screen. We can create lines on the canvas by specifying the start and end points of the line.
Here’s some code to get us started:
import tkinter as tk
WIDTH = 600
HEIGHT = 400
root = tk.Tk()
canvas = tk.Canvas(root, width=WIDTH, height=HEIGHT)
canvas.pack()
line = canvas.create_line(0, 0, 50, 0, fill="red")
root.mainloop()
In this code, we’ve created a Canvas
widget and set its width and height to 600 and 400 respectively. We’ve then created a line on the canvas using the create_line
method. The create_line
method takes four arguments: the x and y coordinates of the starting point of the line and the x and y coordinates of the ending point of the line. We’ve also set the color of the line to red using the fill
attribute.
Now, let’s modify the code to make the line length-dependent color:
import tkinter as tk
WIDTH = 600
HEIGHT = 400
root = tk.Tk()
canvas = tk.Canvas(root, width=WIDTH, height=HEIGHT)
canvas.pack()
def get_line_color(length):
if length < 50:
return "red"
elif length < 100:
return "orange"
elif length < 150:
return "yellow"
elif length < 200:
return "green"
else:
return "blue"
line = canvas.create_line(0, 0, 200, 0)
length = abs(line[2] - line[0])
color = get_line_color(length)
canvas.itemconfig(line, fill=color)
root.mainloop()
In this modified code, we’ve added a get_line_color
function that takes the length of the line as its argument and returns a color based on the length. We’re using this function to set the color of the line instead of setting it manually.
The create_line
method now creates a line of length 200 instead of 50, and the length of the line is calculated using the abs
function. We’ve then called the get_line_color
function to get the color for the line and set it using the itemconfig
method.
Conclusion
In this tutorial, we’ve learned how to create colored lines in Tkinter based on their length. We’ve used the Canvas
widget to create lines and the get_line_color
function to get the color of the line based on its length. With just a few lines of code, we can add some visual interest to our GUI applications.