tkup

tkup is a thin wrapper around standard Tkinter widgets, allowing you to write code that visually reflects the widget hierarchy. It doesn't try to reinvent the wheel and just helps you use normal Tkinter in a streamlined way.

Typical Tkinter code is flat, even though it represents a heavily nested structure, which makes it difficult to quickly read and understand the true organization of the GUI. You must also explicitly assign each widget's master, which is error-prone and verbose:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

app = tk.Tk()
app.title("Demo")

outer_frame = ttk.Frame(app)
outer_frame.grid()
hi_button = ttk.Button(outer_frame, text="hi")
hi_button.grid()

app.mainloop()

tkup solves this by using nested with-statements. There are factory functions for each kind of widget, and you can use them as context managers so that nested master widgets are automatically assigned. Post-instantiation calls, like gridding, can be accomplished two ways, most traditionally by naming the yielded value:

from tkup import GUI

app = GUI()

with app.root() as root:
    root.title("Demo")
    with app.frame() as outer_frame:
        outer_frame.grid()
        with app.button(text="hi") as hi_button:
            hi_button.grid()

app.run()

However, naming every single widget just to grid it can be tiresome. Inspired by Kotlin's implicit creation of the it variable in lambdas, the GUI class provides an it method which returns the current master widget, and there is an additional convenience method called with_it which returns the GUI instance and its it method for quick assignment to variables:

from tkup import GUI

app, it = GUI().with_it()

with app.root():
    it().title("Demo")
    with app.frame():
        it().grid()
        with app.button(text="hi"):
            it().grid()

app.run()

tkup prefers themed (ttk) widgets wherever available. If you want to use classic widgets, or if you want to use a custom subclass of tkinter.Widget, then you can use the GUI widget method and pass in the type to instantiate:

import tkinter as tk
from tkup import GUI

app = GUI()

with app.root():
    with app.widget(tk.Button, text="foo"):
        ...

Installation

pip install tkup

tkup supports Python 3.5 and higher.

Development

Please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md.