Creating menu bars

In this recipe, we will add a menu bar to our main window, add menus to the menu bar, and then add menu items to the menus.

Getting ready

We will start by learning the techniques of how to add a menu bar, several menus and a few menu items to show the principle of how to do it. Clicking on a menu item will have no effect. Next, we will add functionality to the menu items, for example, closing the main window when clicking the Exit menu item and displaying a Help | About dialog.

We are continuing to extend the GUI we created in the current and previous chapter.

How to do it...

First, we have to import the Menu class from tkinter. Add the following line of code to the top of the Python module, where the import statements live:

from tkinter import Menu

Next, we will create the menu bar. Add the following code towards the bottom of the module, just above where we create the main event loop:

menuBar = Menu(win)                      # 1
win.config(menu=menuBar)

Now we add a menu to the...