Tkinter Text

Summary: 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 textarea with various styles. Besides the 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)

In this syntax:

• The master is the parent component of the Text widget.
• The cnf is a dictionary that specifies the widget’s configuration.
• The kw is 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.

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()Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Output:

In this example, the height argument specifies the number of rows of the Text widget.

Inserting initial content

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

from tkinter import Tk, Text

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

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

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

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

Output:

The first argument of the insert() method is the position where you want to insert the text.

The position has the following format:

'line.column'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

In the above example, '1.0' means line 1, character 0, which is the first character of the first line on the text area.

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')Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

The get() method accepts two arguments. The first argument is the start position, and the second is the end position.

To retrieve only part of the text, you can specify different start and end positions.

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'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

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

text['state'] = 'normal'Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

Summary

• Use Tkinter Text widget to create a multi-line text area.