I believe you should not execute the main loop on a different thread. AFAIK, the main loop should be executed on the same thread that created the widget.
The GUI toolkits that I am familiar with (Tkinter, .NET Windows Forms) are that way: You can manipulate the GUI from one thread only.
On Linux, your code raises an exception:
self.tk.mainloop(n)
RuntimeError: Calling Tcl from different appartment
One of the following will work:
(no extra threads)
if __name__ == '__main__':
t = tk.Tk()
t.iconbitmap('icon.ico')
b = tk.Button(text='test', command=exit)
b.grid(row=0)
t.mainloop()
(with extra thread)
def threadmain():
t = tk.Tk()
t.iconbitmap('icon.ico')
b = tk.Button(text='test', command=exit)
b.grid(row=0)
t.mainloop()
if __name__ == '__main__':
thread.start_new_thread(threadmain, ())
while 1:
sleep(1)
Edit:
If you need to do communicate with tkinter from outside the tkinter thread, I suggest you set up a timer that checks a queue for work.
Here is an example:
import Tkinter as tk
import thread
from time import sleep
import Queue
request_queue = Queue.Queue()
result_queue = Queue.Queue()
def submit_to_tkinter(callable, *args, **kwargs):
request_queue.put((callable, args, kwargs))
return result_queue.get()
t = None
def threadmain():
global t
def timertick():
try:
callable, args, kwargs = request_queue.get_nowait()
except Queue.Empty:
pass
else:
print "something in queue"
retval = callable(*args, **kwargs)
result_queue.put(retval)
t.after(500, timertick)
t = tk.Tk()
t.configure(width=640, height=480)
b = tk.Button(text='test', name='button', command=exit)
b.place(x=0, y=0)
timertick()
t.mainloop()
def foo():
t.title("Hello world")
def bar(button_text):
t.children["button"].configure(text=button_text)
def get_button_text():
return t.children["button"]["text"]
if __name__ == '__main__':
thread.start_new_thread(threadmain, ())
trigger = 0
while 1:
trigger += 1
if trigger == 3:
submit_to_tkinter(foo)
if trigger == 5:
submit_to_tkinter(bar, "changed")
if trigger == 7:
print submit_to_tkinter(get_button_text)
sleep(1)