of all the prior section' gui optionsthoughtkinter is by far the de facto standard way to implement portable user interfaces in python todayand the focus of this part of the book the rationale for this approach was explained in in shortwe elected to present one toolkit in satisfying depth instead of many toolkits in less-thanuseful fashion moreovermost of the tkinter programming concepts you learn here will translate directly to any other gui toolkit you choose to utilize tkinter pragmatics perhaps more to the pointthoughthere are pragmatic reasons that the python world still gravitates to tkinter as its de facto standard portable gui toolkit among themtkinter' accessibilityportabilityavailabilitydocumentationand extensions have made it the most widely used python gui solution for many years runningaccessibility tkinter is generally regarded as lightweight toolkit and one of the simplest gui solutions for python available today unlike larger frameworksit is easy to get started in tkinter right awaywithout first having to grasp much larger class interaction model as we'll seeprogrammers can create simple tkinter guis in few lines of python code and scale up to writing industrial-strength guis gradually although the tkinter api is basicadditional widgets can be coded in python or obtained in extension packages such as pmwtixand ttk portability python script that builds gui with tkinter will run without source code changes on all major windowing platforms todaymicrosoft windowsx windows (on unix and linux)and the macintosh os (and also ran on mac classicsfurtherthat same script will provide native look-and-feel to its users on each of these platforms in factthis feature became more apparent as tk matured pythontkinter script today looks like windows program on windowson unix and linuxit provides the same interaction but sports an appearance familiar to windows usersand on the macit looks like mac program should availability tkinter is standard module in the python libraryshipped with the interpreter if you have pythonyou have tkinter moreovermost python installation packages (including the standard python self-installer for windowsthat provided on mac os xand many linux distributionscome with tkinter support bundled because of thatscripts written to use the tkinter module work immediately on most python interpreterswithout any extra installation steps tkinter is also generally better supported than its alternatives today because the underlying tk library is also used by the tcl and perl programming languages (and others)it tends to receive more development resources than other toolkits available tkinter overview