Oddities of Tkinter

[Eric Brunel]

On 24 Jan 2006 12:37:01 -0800, Tuvas <tuvas21 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I thought I mentioned that I'm running in linux, and yes, there are
> threads involved. I just don't know why on one machine that it would
> run so differently than another.

The only secure way I found to make Tkinter mix with threads is to never  
issue commands altering the graphical state of the application in another  
thread than the one where the mainloop was started. Not doing that often  
leads to random behaviour such as the one you have here. Fortunately, one  
of the commands that seems to work in secondary threads is event_generate,  
giving you a means to communicate between threads. If you have to pass  
information from one thread to another, you can use a Queue.

For example:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
import threading
import time
import Queue
 from Tkinter import *

## Create main window
root = Tk()

## Communication queue
commQueue = Queue.Queue()

## Function run in thread
def timeThread():
   curTime = 0
   while 1:
     ## Each time the time increases, put the new value in the queue...
     commQueue.put(curTime)
     ## ... and generate a custom event on the main window
     try:
       root.event_generate('<<TimeChanged>>', when='tail')
     ## If it failed, the window has been destoyed: over
     except TclError:
       break
     ## Next
     time.sleep(1)
     curTime += 1

## In the main thread, do usual stuff
timeVar = IntVar()
Label(root, textvariable=timeVar, width=8).pack()

## Use a binding on the custom event to get the new time value
## and change the variable to update the display
def timeChanged(event):
   timeVar.set(commQueue.get())

root.bind('<<TimeChanged>>', timeChanged)

## Run the thread and the GUI main loop
th=threading.Thread(target=timeThread)
th.start()

root.mainloop()
---------------------------------------------------------------------

This obvioulsy complicates things a bit, but it may work far better.  
Please note that the 'when' option *must* be specified in the call to  
event_generate and *must not* be 'now'. If it's not specified or if it's  
'now', Tkinter may directly execute the binding in the secondary thread's  
context.

HTH

(BTW, please quote the question to which you're replying. You're fortunate  
I still had your original question in mind, or I would have had no idea of  
what you were talking about...)
-- 
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in  
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17;8(%,5.Z65\'*9--56l7+-'])"