Widgets determine the actions that users can perform with our GUI application; however, we should pay attention to their placement and the relationships we establish with that arrangement. Effective layouts help users to identify the meaning and priority of each graphical element so that they can quickly understand how to interact with our program.

Layout also determines the visual appearance that users expect to find consistently across the whole application, such as always placing confirmation buttons at the bottom-right corner of the screen. Although this information might be obvious to us as developers, end users may feel overwhelmed if we do not guide them through the application by following a natural order.

This chapter will dive into the different mechanisms that Tkinter offers to lay out and group widgets and control other attributes, such as their size or...

A frame represents a rectangular region of a window, typically used in complex layouts to contain other widgets. Since they have their own padding, border, and background, you can remark that the group of widgets is related logically.

Another common pattern for frames is to encapsulate part of the application's functionality so that you can create an abstraction that hides the implementation details of child widgets.

We will see an example that covers both scenarios by creating a component that inherits from the Frame class and exposes certain information on the containing widgets.

We will build an application that contains two lists, where the first one has a list of items and...

In previous recipes, we have seen that creating a widget does not automatically display it on the screen. We have called the pack() method on each widget to do so, which means that we used the Pack geometry manager.

This is one of the three available geometry managers in Tkinter, and it is well suited for simple layouts, such as when you want to place all the widgets on top of each other or side by side.

Let's suppose that we want to achieve the following layout in our application:

It consists of three rows, where the last one has three widgets placed side by side. In this scenario, the Pack geometry manager can easily add the widgets as expected, without the need for additional...

The Grid geometry manager is considered the more versatile of the three geometry managers. It directly reassembles the grid concept that is commonly used in user interface design—a two-dimensional table divided into rows and columns, where each cell represents the space available for a widget.

We will demonstrate how to use the Grid geometry manager to achieve the following layout:

This can be represented as a 3 x 3 table, where the widgets in the second and third columns span two rows and the widget at the bottom row spans three columns.

The Place geometry manager allows you to set the position and size of a widget in absolute terms, or in relative terms to another one.

Of the three geometry managers, it is the least commonly used one. On the other hand, it can fit some complex scenarios where you want to freely position a widget or overlap a previously placed one.

To demonstrate how to work with the Place geometry manager, we will replicate the following layout by mixing absolute and relative positions and sizes:

The labels that we will display...

The LabelFrame class can be used to group multiple input widgets, indicating the logical entity with a label they represent. It is typically used in forms and is very similar to the Frame widget.

We will build a form with a couple of LabelFrame instances, each one with their corresponding child input widgets:

Since the purpose of this example is to show the final layout, we will add some widgets, without keeping their references as attributes:

import tkinter as tk

class App(tk.Tk):
    def __init__...

The Grid geometry manager is easy to use both in simple and advanced layouts, and it is also a powerful mechanism to combine with a list of widgets.

We will take a look at how we can reduce the number of lines and call the geometry manager methods with just a few lines, thanks to list comprehensions and the zip and enumerate built-in functions.

The application we will build contains four Entry widgets, each one with its corresponding label that indicates the meaning of the input. We will also add a button to print all the entries' values:

Instead of creating and assigning each widget to a separate attribute, we will work with lists of widgets. Since we will track the index...

In Tkinter, geometry managers take all the necessary space to fit all the widgets in their parent container. However, if the container has a fixed size or exceeds the screen's size, there will be a region that will not be visible to users.

Scroll bar widgets are not automatically added in Tkinter, so you must create and lay them out as any other type of widget. Another consideration is that only a few widget classes have the configuration options that make it possible to connect them to a scrollbar.

To work around this, you will learn to take advantage of the flexibility of the Canvas widget to make any container scrollable.

To demonstrate the combination of the...