Tkinter buttons (GUI Programming)

Buttons are standard widgets in a GUI. They come with the default Tkinter module and you can place them in your window.

A Python function or method can be associated with a button. This function or method is named the callback function. If you click the button, the callback function is called.

A note on buttons: a tkinter button can only show text in a single font. The button text can be multi line. That means that this widget won't show icons next to the text, for that you'd need another widget.

Example

Introduction

You can create and position a button with these lines:

exitButton = Button(self, text="Exit", command=self.clickExitButton)
exitButton.place(x=0, y=0)

The callback method is clickExitButton, which is assigned in the above line (command=). This is a simple method:

def clickExitButton(self):
        exit()

Without a callback method, a button is shown but clicking it won't do anything.

This window should show up:

Button example

To run the example, save it as button.py and run it with the python interpreter. This example opens a window, shows a button and you can click the button.

from tkinter import *

class Window(Frame):

    def __init__(self, master=None):
        Frame.__init__(self, master)
        self.master = master

        # widget can take all window
        self.pack(fill=BOTH, expand=1)

        # create button, link it to clickExitButton()
        exitButton = Button(self, text="Exit", command=self.clickExitButton)

        # place button at (0,0)
        exitButton.place(x=0, y=0)

    def clickExitButton(self):
        exit()

root = Tk()
app = Window(root)
root.wm_title("Tkinter button")
root.geometry("320x200")
root.mainloop()

Download Tkinter Example