How do I freeze Tkinter applications?¶

Freeze is a tool to create stand-alone applications. When freezing Tkinterapplications, the applications will not be truly stand-alone, as the applicationwill still need the Tcl and Tk libraries.

One solution is to ship the application with the Tcl and Tk libraries, and pointto them at run-time using theTCL_LIBRARY andTK_LIBRARYenvironment variables.

To get truly stand-alone applications, the Tcl scripts that form the libraryhave to be integrated into the application as well. One tool supporting that isSAM (stand-alone modules), which is part of the Tix distribution(https://tix.sourceforge.net/).

Build Tix with SAM enabled, perform the appropriate call toTclsam_init(), etc. inside Python’sModules/tkappinit.c, and link with libtclsam and libtksam (youmight include the Tix libraries as well).

Can I have Tk events handled while waiting for I/O?¶

On platforms other than Windows, yes, and you don’t evenneed threads! But you’ll have to restructure your I/Ocode a bit. Tk has the equivalent of Xt’sXtAddInput() call, which allows youto register a callback function which will be called from the Tk mainloop whenI/O is possible on a file descriptor. SeeFile Handlers.

I can’t get key bindings to work in Tkinter: why?¶

An often-heard complaint is that event handlersboundto events with thebind() methoddon’t get handled even when the appropriate key is pressed.

The most common cause is that the widget to which the binding applies doesn’thave “keyboard focus”. Check out the Tk documentation for the focus command.Usually a widget is given the keyboard focus by clicking in it (but not forlabels; see the takefocus option).