Tabs 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

"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 2

import Tix

help(Tix.NoteBook)

If on Windows, Tix is included. On other platforms, just install the necessary package.

If on a recent enough Python (2.7) and/or Tcl/Tk (8.5) (with the optional python-ttk module), you can do:

import ttk

help(ttk.Notebook)

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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. _*