Arranging widgets#

Creating a widget doesn’t make it appear — a geometry manager has to place it inside its parent first. This page is the map: which manager to choose, the rules they all share, and the spacing model that goes with them.

Geometry managers#

tkinter has three managers, and you choose one per container based on the shape of the layout:

  • grid — rows and columns, like a table. The workhorse for forms and anything that lines up in two dimensions. Start here: Layout with grid.

  • pack — stack widgets against a side. Ideal for toolbars, a column of controls, or a content area above a status bar: Layout with pack.

  • place — exact coordinates, for overlays and the rare pixel-perfect case. You’ll seldom need it; it’s covered briefly on the pack page.

Two rules hold no matter which manager you use:

One manager per container. Don’t mix grid and pack on children of the same parent — they size things differently and tkinter will hang trying to reconcile them.

Nest frames to combine them. Real windows are frames inside frames, each using whichever manager fits that region — a toolbar packed along the top, a form gridded inside the content area. Both tutorials build toward exactly that.

New here? Read Layout with grid first — it’s the manager you’ll reach for most — then Layout with pack.

Spacing#

Every gap in a well-spaced window comes from one of three layers, with confusingly similar names. Fix the model once and spacing decisions become mechanical.

Around the widget. padx and pady are the geometry manager’s margin — clear space between a widget and its neighbors. They are options to grid() and pack(), identical in both, not options on the widget. A single number pads both sides equally; a two-tuple pads each side on its own:

save.pack(side="left", padx=5)               # 5px on the left and the right
close.pack(side="left", padx=(0, 5))         # nothing left, 5px right
label.grid(row=0, column=0, pady=(10, 2))    # 10px above, 2px below

Inside the widget. padding is a widget option: interior space between a ttk widget’s edge and its content. It belongs to the widget, so it travels with it wherever it is placed. One value pads all four sides, two read as (horizontal, vertical), four as (left, top, right, bottom):

form = ttk.Frame(app, padding=16)                       # 16px on all sides
wide = ttk.Button(app, text="Wide", padding=(24, 2))    # wider, barely taller

Not every ttk widget has it — input widgets like Entry and Combobox take their interior inset from the theme.

The manager stretching the widget. ipadx and ipady — also options to grid() and pack() — make a widget’s allocation bigger than the size it asked for. The effect looks like padding, but the extra size belongs to that one placement call rather than to the widget. On widgets that have padding, prefer it; ipadx/ipady earn their keep on the widgets that don’t — the classic way to make an Entry taller is ipady:

search = ttk.Entry(form)
search.pack(fill="x", ipady=4)     # a taller input

place positions by coordinates and has no spacing options at all.

Let the container own its margins. Rather than repeating padx/pady on every child, give the frame a padding and let the children pad only against each other — one number to tune instead of a dozen:

form = ttk.Frame(app, padding=16)      # the frame owns the outer margin
form.pack(fill="both", expand=True)

ttk.Label(form, text="Email").grid(row=0, column=0, sticky="w", pady=4)
ttk.Entry(form).grid(row=0, column=1, sticky="ew", pady=4)

This is the pattern every example in these docs uses.

Note

The classic tk widgets blur the names: Text, TkLabel and TkFrame accept padx/pady as widget options — passed to the constructor, like padding — and there they mean the interior layer, not the manager’s margin. On a themed Text the theme manages them; pass autostyle=False to set your own (see Text).

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