Tkinter ScrolledText

Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use the Tkinter ScrolledText widget that consists of a Text widget and vertical Scrollbar widget.

Introduction to the Tkinter ScrolledText widget

So far, you’ve learned how to create a Text widget and how to link a vertical Scrollbar to the text widget.

To make it more convenient, Tkinter provides you with the ScrolledText widget which does the same things as a text widget linked to a vertical scroll bar.

To use the ScrolledText widget, you need to import the ScrolledText class from the tkinter.scrolledtext module.

Technically, the ScrolledText class inherits from the Text class.

The ScrolledText widget uses a Frame widget inserted between the container and the Text widget to hold the Scrollbar widget.

Therefore, the ScrolledText has the same properties and methods as the Text widget. In addition, the geometry manager methods including pack, grid, and place are restricted to the Frame.

Tkinter ScrolledText widget example

The following program illustrates how to create a ScrolledText widget:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter.scrolledtext import ScrolledText


root = tk.Tk()
root.title("ScrolledText Widget")


st = ScrolledText(root, width=50,  height=10)
st.pack(fill=tk.BOTH, side=tk.LEFT, expand=True)

root.mainloop()Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Output:

How it works.

• First, import the tkinter module and the ScrolledText class from the tkinter.scrolledtext module.
• Second, create the root window and set its title to 'ScrolledText Widget'.
• Third, create a new ScrolledText widget and display it on the root window.
• Finally, start the main loop.

Here’s the same program but written using the object-oriented programming approach:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter.scrolledtext import ScrolledText


class App(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.title("ScrolledText Widget")
        st = ScrolledText(self, width=50, height=10)
        st.pack(fill=tk.BOTH, side=tk.LEFT, expand=True)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = App()
    app.mainloop()
Code language: Python (python)

Summary

• Use the Tkinter ScrolledText widget to create a Text widget with a vertical Scrollbar.