Part IV describes the Tk widgets. These are the components you use to build up your graphical user interface. Tk widgets are simple to use, so you can rapidly develop your interface. At the same time, they have sophisticated features that you can use to fine-tune your interface in response to user feedback.

Chapter 30 describes buttons and menus. Tk 8.0 adds native look and feel to these widgets, so a single script will look different depending on the platform it is running on.

Associated with the widgets is a resource database that stores settings like colors and fonts. Chapter 31 describes the resource database and generalizes it to store button and menu configurations.

Chapter 32 describes a few simple widgets. The frame, labelframe, and toplevel are containers for other widgets. The label displays a text string. The message formats a long text string onto multiple lines. The scale represents a numeric value. The bell command rings the terminal bell.

Chapter 33 describes scrollbars, which can be attached in a general way to other widgets.

Chapter 34 describes entry widgets, which provide one line of editable text and spinboxes, which allow users to select from multiple values by “spinning” through selections.

Chapter 35 describes the listbox widget that displays several lines of text. The lines are manipulated as units.

Chapter 36 describes the general-purpose text widget. It can display multiple fonts and have binding tags on ranges of text.

Chapter 37 describes the canvas widget. The canvas manages objects like lines, boxes, images, arcs, and text labels. You can have binding tags on these objects and classes of objects.