Packing toward a Side

The following example creates two frames and packs them toward the top side of the main window. The upper frame, .one, is not as big and the main window shows through on either side. The children are packed toward the specified side in order, so .one is on top. The four possible sides are: top, right, bottom, and left. The top side is the default.

Example 23-1 Two frames packed inside the main frame.

# Make the main window black
. config -bg black
# Create and pack two frames
frame .one -width 40 -height 40 -bg white
frame .two -width 100 -height 50 -bg grey50
pack .one .two -side top

Shrinking Frames and pack propagate

In the previous example, the main window shrank down to be just large enough to hold its two children. In most cases this is the desired behavior. If not, you can turn it off with the pack propagate command. Apply this to the parent frame, and it will not adjust its size to fit its children:

Example 23-2 Turning off geometry propagation.

frame .one -width 40 -height 40 -bg white
frame .two -width 100 -height 50 -bg grey50
pack propagate . false
pack .one .two -side top