tkstart 1.0.5

Small starter kit for tkinter: clipboard, window helpers, styled widgets, project templates.

tkstart

A compact starter kit for tkinter — a curated collection of helpers that take the boilerplate out of small desktop applications. Built so you can have a window on screen in five lines and stay focused on what the app does, not how tkinter wants you to write it.

import tkinter as tk
import tkstart

root = tk.Tk()
root.geometry("400x300")
tkstart.center(root)
tkstart.title(root, "Hello").pack(pady=20)
tkstart.button(root, "OK", command=root.destroy, primary=True).pack()
root.mainloop()

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✨ Features

• 📋 Clipboard helpers — robust copy/paste across Windows, macOS, Linux. Native Windows API path works even on locked-down VM images where clip.exe is missing.
• 🪟 Window helpers — one-line center() / maximize() / toggle_fullscreen() / set_icon().
• 🖼️ Image loading — Pillow-powered load_image() and thumbnail() with sensible fallbacks.
• 🎛️ Styled widget factories — quick button() / title() / labeled_entry() / separator() with a consistent look.
• 🌈 Colour utilities — hex/RGB conversion, lighten(), darken(), mix(), automatic contrast text picking.
• ✅ Input validators — required, min_length, max_length, is_email, is_phone, is_number, between — all returning None on success.
• 🎨 Theme presets — LIGHT, DARK, SOFT plus a dataclass-based Theme you can clone and tweak.
• 🛠️ Utility belt — money formatting, date parsing, slugify, search-tolerant string matching, safe file names.

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📦 Installation

pip install tkstart

A single command installs tkstart together with its three runtime dependencies (Pillow, psycopg2-binary, pyperclip), so any project that uses the helpers runs straight out of the box. Tkinter itself ships with Python.

To remove later:

pip uninstall tkstart

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🧩 Modules

Module	Purpose
tkstart.clipboard	copy, paste, clear, last_resort_path
tkstart.window	center, maximize, toggle_fullscreen, set_icon
tkstart.images	load_image, thumbnail
tkstart.widgets	button, title, separator, labeled_entry
tkstart.colors	hex_to_rgb, rgb_to_hex, lighten, darken, mix, luminance, is_dark, contrast_text
tkstart.validation	required, min_length, max_length, is_email, is_phone, is_number, between
tkstart.theme	Theme, LIGHT, DARK, SOFT, apply, current, reset
tkstart.utils	format_money, parse_date, format_date, today_str, truncate, matches_search, slugify, safe_filename

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📚 Examples

Clipboard

import tkstart

tkstart.copy("hello world")
print(tkstart.paste())   # 'hello world'
tkstart.clear()

Window helpers

import tkinter as tk
import tkstart

root = tk.Tk()
root.geometry("500x400")
tkstart.center(root)
tkstart.set_icon(root, "icon.ico")
root.mainloop()

Validators

from tkstart import validation as v

v.required("hello")            # None — valid
v.required("")                 # 'value is required'
v.is_email("[e-mail]")    # None
v.is_phone("[phone]") # None
v.between("50", 0, 100)        # None

Colours

from tkstart import colors

colors.hex_to_rgb("#7FFF00")     # (127, 255, 0)
colors.lighten("#42A5F5", 0.3)
colors.darken("#42A5F5", 0.3)
colors.mix("#FF0000", "#0000FF", 0.5)
colors.contrast_text("#FFFFFF")  # '#000000'

Themes

from tkstart import theme

theme.apply(theme.DARK)
t = theme.current()
print(t.bg, t.primary, t.font)

custom = theme.LIGHT.copy(primary="#FF5722")
theme.apply(custom)

Money & dates

from tkstart import utils

utils.format_money(1500)          # '1500.00 ₽'
utils.parse_date("2026-06-02")    # date(2026, 6, 2)
utils.parse_date("02.06.2026")    # date(2026, 6, 2)
utils.today_str()                 # '2026-06-02'
utils.truncate("a long string", 8)

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🖥️ Compatibility

	Versions
Python	3.8 — 3.12
Windows	7 / 8 / 10 / 11
macOS	10.13 +
Linux	any X11 / Wayland session

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📄 License

MIT — see LICENSE for details.