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What's Tkinter?

The Tkinter module (“Tk interface”) is the standard Python interface to the Tk GUI toolkit from Scriptics (formerly developed by Sun Labs).


Tkinter consists of a number of modules. The Tk interface is provided by a binary extension module named _tkinter. This module contains the low-level interface to Tk, and should never be used directly by application programmers. It is usually a shared library (or DLL), but might in some cases be statically linked with the Python interpreter.

The public interface is provided through a number of Python modules. The most important interface module is the Tkinter module itself. To use Tkinter, all you need to do is to import the Tkinter module:

import Tkinter

Or, more often:

from Tkinter import *

The Tkinter module only exports widget classes and associated constants, so you can safely use the from-in form in most cases. If you prefer not to, but still want to save some typing, you can use import-as:

import Tkinter as Tk
