Tkinter

Tkinter is the standard GUI toolkit for Python. It is a binding to the Tk GUI toolkit and provides a simple, portable way to create graphical user interfaces across Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Tk originated with the Tcl/Tk tool, created by John Ousterhout. The Python bindings were developed to expose Tk's widgets to Python programs. In Python 3, the module is named tkinter; in Python 2 it was Tkinter.

The library is included with the Python standard library; no external dependencies. It offers a set of standard widgets—labels, buttons, text fields, checkbuttons, radiobuttons, list boxes, menus, canvases, and more—and layout managers such as pack, grid, and place. The ttk submodule provides themed widgets that have a more modern appearance.

Event handling is done with callbacks and event bindings; typical pattern is creating a root window, creating widgets, arranging them with a geometry manager, and calling mainloop to start the event loop.

Strengths and limitations: Tkinter is easy to learn and sufficient for small to medium GUIs and educational projects; it is lightweight and stable, but it offers fewer widgets and less polished visuals compared to more feature-rich toolkits like PyQt or wxPython. It remains widely used for simple tools and quick prototypes.