tklayout 1.0.0

This library simplifies the layout of Tkinter user interfaces by allowing the developer to specify the structure of the interface elements from the inside out.

Whereas Tkinter requires that nested frames and other widgets be created from the outside in (i.e., the outermost frame created first), the layout of an interface is often easier to conceptualize and describe from the inside out. For example, a layout composed of the following elements:

+------------------------------------+
|              Element D             |
+-------------------+----------------+
|    Element A      |                |
+-------------------+    Element C   |
|    Element B      |                |
+-------------------+----------------+
|              Element E             |
+------------------------------------+

could be described as

• Elements A and B vertically arranged in a column,

• Joined left to right with Element C in a row,

• Joined in a single column with Element D above and Element E below.

This sort of narrative description can be easily represented in code by assigning names to each of the layout elements (e.g., “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”, and “E”), instantiating an object of the AppLayout class from the tklayout module (e.g., “lo”), and then calling the following methods:

ab = lo.column_elements(["A", "B"])
abc = lo.row_elements([ab, "C"])
app = lo.column_elements(["D", abc, "E"])

and then creating the frames to represent this layout with:

lo.create_layout(root, app)

Restructuring the application’s layout is easily done simply by changing the calls to the row_elements() and column_elements() methods.

Full documentation is at ReadTheDocs: http://tklayout.readthedocs.io/