CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7tkinter
Aaditya M Nair
Aaditya M Nair

Reputation: 53

tkinter.mainloop does not work

I am trying to create a basic Tkinter window.
According to on-line tutorials, to create a window one must use the following: 

import Tkinter
window=Tkinter.Tk()
window.mainloop()

But when I try the same code python directly displays the window in window=Tkinter.Tk() and window.mainloop() has no effect. Can anyone explain why ?

EDIT: The code works perfectly when I put it in a file and run it. It just doesn't work from interactive prompt.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2445

Answers (1)

dano
dano

Reputation: 94881

The call to mainloop is there so that you can interact with the Window once it's created. If you had a Python script that only did this:

import Tkinter
window = Tkinter.Tk()

The script would exit immediately after window was created, so you'd be luckily to even see it get drawn before it disappeared as the script exited. (That is if window was even drawn at all; in my tests on both Linux and Windows, window was never drawn unless mainloop was called; even if I put a call to time.sleep after the Tkinter.Tk() call, window would only be drawn without a mainloop call in the interactive prompt).

The mainloop() also (and most importantly) allows Tkinter to listen for events to occur on the Tk object, such as pressing buttons, radios, etc. that might be embedded in it, and dispatch those events to methods you have bound to the event being triggered. Without that functionality you'd just have a window that you can look at and not much else.

Upvotes: 1

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