This is an unofficial mirror of Tkinter reference documentation (based on Python 2.7 and Tk 8.5) created by the late John Shipman. It was last updated in 2013 and is unmaintained.  

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54. Events: responding to stimuli

An event is something that happens to your application—for example, the user presses a key or clicks or drags the mouse—to which the application needs to react.

The widgets normally have a lot of built-in behaviors. For example, a button will react to a mouse click by calling its command callback. For another example, if you move the focus to an entry widget and press a letter, that letter gets added to the content of the widget.

However, the event binding capability of Tkinter allows you to add, change, or delete behaviors.

First, some definitions:

  • An event is some occurrence that your application needs to know about.

  • An event handler is a function in your application that gets called when an event occurs.

  • We call it binding when your application sets up an event handler that gets called when an event happens to a widget.