Tkinter Text Widget

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the Tkinter Text widget to add a text editor to your application.

Introduction to the Tkinter Text Widget

The Text widget allows you to display and edit multi-line text areas with various styles. Besides plain text, the Text widget supports embedded images and links.

To create a text widget, you use the following syntax:

text = tk.Text(master, conf={}, **kw)

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In this syntax:

• master: The parent component of the Text widget.
• conf: A dictionary that specifies the widget’s configuration.
• kw: One or more keyword arguments used to configure the Text widget.

Note that the Text widget is only available in the Tkinter module, not the Tkinter.ttk module.

Creating a Basic Text Widget

The following example creates a Text widget with eight rows and places it on the root window:

from tkinter import Tk, Text

root = Tk()
root.resizable(False, False)
root.title("Text Widget Example")

text = Text(root, height=8)
text.pack()

root.mainloop()

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Inserting Initial Content

To insert content into the text area, you use the insert() method. For example:

text.insert('1.0', 'This is a Text widget demo')

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Retrieving the Text Value

To retrieve the contents of a Text widget, you use its get() method. For example:

text_content = text.get('1.0','end')

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The get() method accepts two arguments: the start position and the end position.

Disabling the Text Widget

To prevent users from changing the contents of a Text widget, you can disable it by setting the state option to 'disabled' like this:

text['state'] = 'disabled'

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To re-enable editing, you can change the state option back to normal:

text['state'] = 'normal'

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Conclusion

The Tkinter Text widget is a powerful tool for creating multi-line text areas in your application. Here are the key takeaways:

• Create a text area using the tk.Text() constructor.
• Insert and retrieve text using the insert() and get() methods.
• Control editing capabilities by setting the state of the widget.

With these features, you can enhance user interaction in your Tkinter applications.