Notebook widget in Tkinter

Question

Having played around a little with both Tkinter and wxPython, I like Tkinter much better in terms of how clean my source code looks. However, it doesn't seem to have as many features; in particular it doesn't have tabs (as in, the tabs at the top of a Firefox window).

A little Googling on the subject offers a few suggestions. There's a cookbook entry with a class allowing you to use tabs, but it's very primitive. There's also Python megawidgets on SourceForge, although this seems very old and gave me errors during installation.

Does anyone have experience making tabbed GUIs in Tkinter? What did you use? Or is it simply the case that anyone who needs more powerful windowing components has to use wxPython?

Answer 1

On recent Python (> 2.7) versions, you can use the ttk module, which provides access to the Tk themed widget set, which has been introduced in Tk 8.5.

Here's how you import ttk in Python 2:

import ttk

help(ttk.Notebook)

In Python 3, the ttk module comes with the standard distributions as a submodule of tkinter.

Here's a simple working example based on an example from the TkDocs website:

from tkinter import ttk
import tkinter as tk
from tkinter.scrolledtext import ScrolledText


def demo():
    root = tk.Tk()
    root.title("ttk.Notebook")

    nb = ttk.Notebook(root)

    # adding Frames as pages for the ttk.Notebook 
    # first page, which would get widgets gridded into it
    page1 = ttk.Frame(nb)

    # second page
    page2 = ttk.Frame(nb)
    text = ScrolledText(page2)
    text.pack(expand=1, fill="both")

    nb.add(page1, text='One')
    nb.add(page2, text='Two')

    nb.pack(expand=1, fill="both")

    root.mainloop()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    demo()

Another alternative is to use the NoteBook widget from the tkinter.tix library. To use tkinter.tix, you must have the Tix widgets installed, usually alongside your installation of the Tk widgets. To test your installation, try the following:

from tkinter import tix
root = tix.Tk()
root.tk.eval('package require Tix')

For more info, check out this webpage on the PSF website.

Note that tix is pretty old and not well-supported, so your best choice might be to go for ttk.Notebook.

Answer 2

If anyone still looking, I have got this working as Tab in tkinter. Play around with the code to make it function the way you want (for example, you can add button to add a new tab):

from tkinter import *

class Tabs(Frame):

    """Tabs for testgen output"""

    def __init__(self, parent):
        super(Tabs, self).__init__()
        self.parent = parent
        self.columnconfigure(10, weight=1)
        self.rowconfigure(3, weight=1)
        self.curtab = None
        self.tabs = {}
        self.addTab()                
        self.pack(fill=BOTH, expand=1, padx=5, pady=5)

    def addTab(self):
        tabslen = len(self.tabs)
        if tabslen < 10:
            tab = {}
            btn = Button(self, text="Tab "+str(tabslen), command=lambda: self.raiseTab(tabslen))
            btn.grid(row=0, column=tabslen, sticky=W+E)

            textbox = Text(self.parent)
            textbox.grid(row=1, column=0, columnspan=10, rowspan=2, sticky=W+E+N+S, in_=self)

            # Y axis scroll bar
            scrollby = Scrollbar(self, command=textbox.yview)
            scrollby.grid(row=7, column=5, rowspan=2, columnspan=1, sticky=N+S+E)
            textbox['yscrollcommand'] = scrollby.set

            tab['id']=tabslen
            tab['btn']=btn
            tab['txtbx']=textbox
            self.tabs[tabslen] = tab
            self.raiseTab(tabslen)

    def raiseTab(self, tabid):
        print(tabid)
        print("curtab"+str(self.curtab))
        if self.curtab!= None and self.curtab != tabid and len(self.tabs)>1:
                self.tabs[tabid]['txtbx'].lift(self)
                self.tabs[self.curtab]['txtbx'].lower(self)
        self.curtab = tabid


def main():
    root = Tk()
    root.geometry("600x450+300+300")
    t = Tabs(root)
    t.addTab()
    root.mainloop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Answer 3

While it may not help you at the moment, tk 8.5 comes with an extended set of widgets. This extended set is available with tk 8.4 by way of an extension known as "tile". Included in the extended set of widgets is a notebook widget. Unfortunately, at this time Tkinter by default uses a fairly old version of Tk that doesn't come with these widgets.

There have been efforts to make tile available to Tkinter. Check out http://tkinter.unpythonic.net/wiki/TileWrapper. For another similar effort see http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyttk. Also, for a taste of how these widgets look (in Ruby, Perl and Tcl) see http://www.tkdocs.com/.

Tk 8.5 is a huge improvement over stock Tk. It introduces several new widgets, native widgets, and a theming engine. Hopefully it will be available by default in Tkinter some day soon. Too bad the Python world is lagging behind other languages.

update: The latest versions of Python now include support for the themed widgets out of the box. _

Answer 4

"Or is it simply the case that anyone who needs more powerful windowing components has to use wxPython?"
Short answer: yes.

Long answer: It may take some practice for your wxPython code to feel "clean," but it is nicer and much more powerful than Tkinter. You will also get better support, since more people use it these days.

Answer 5

What problems did you have with pmw? It's old, yes, but it's pure python so it should work.

Note that Tix doesn't work with py2exe, if that is an issue for you.