Scroll long content#

When content outgrows its window — a long form, a wall of log text — you need a scrollable region. Plain tkinter makes you pair a Canvas (or Text) with a Scrollbar and wire the two together by hand. ttkbootstrap ships two widgets that do that wiring for you: ScrolledFrame for arbitrary widgets, and ScrolledText for text.

A scrollable frame#

ScrolledFrame is a frame with a scrollbar already attached. Treat it as the parent for your content — pack or grid widgets into it and it scrolls when they overflow:

import ttkbootstrap as ttk

app = ttk.App(title="Settings", size=(360, 300))

scroller = ttk.ScrolledFrame(app, auto_hide=True)
scroller.pack(fill="both", expand=True, padx=10, pady=10)

for i in range(40):
    option = ttk.Checkbutton(scroller, text=f"Option {i + 1}", bootstyle="round toggle")
    option.pack(anchor="w", pady=2)

app.mainloop()

  • auto_hide=True hides the scrollbar until the pointer enters the region, then shows it — tidy for dense UIs. Leave it off (the default) to keep the scrollbar always visible.

  • The frame scrolls vertically only.

  • The viewport is a fixed size — the content never stretches it, which is the whole point: the overflow scrolls instead. It defaults to 300×200; pass height=/width= to change that, or pack(fill="both", expand=True) as above to let it fill its parent.

A settings window with a scrollable column of toggle options and a scrollbar at the right edge — light theme A settings window with a scrollable column of toggle options and a scrollbar at the right edge — dark theme

Note

pack/grid/place on a ScrolledFrame lay out the whole assembly — frame plus scrollbar — so most parents just work. A Notebook or PanedWindow is different: it takes a child rather than laying one out, so give it scroller.container:

notebook.add(scroller.container, text="Settings")

A scrollable text box#

ScrolledText is a themed multi-line text widget with its scrollbar attached. The underlying tkinter.Text is exposed as .text — reach through it for the standard Text API (insert, get, delete, tags):

import ttkbootstrap as ttk

app = ttk.App(title="Log", size=(480, 320))

log = ttk.ScrolledText(app, auto_hide=True, padding=10)
log.pack(fill="both", expand=True)

log.text.insert("end", "Application started\n")
log.text.insert("end", "Loading data…\n")
log.text.see("end")            # scroll to the newest line

app.mainloop()

  • .text is the real Text widget — anything the Text reference documents works on it.

  • Pass hbar=True for a horizontal scrollbar too (off by default; vbar is on). Turning it on also stops the text wrapping — long lines run off to the right and scroll sideways instead, which is what the horizontal bar is for.

  • see("end") keeps the newest content in view — the usual move for a log.

Making a log read-only

A Text is editable by default. To use one purely for output, set its state to "disabled" and flip it back around each write — a disabled Text silently discards insert, with no error, so the line simply never appears:

log.text.configure(state="normal")
log.text.insert("end", line)
log.text.configure(state="disabled")

See also