Python Tkinter – ScrolledText Widget

Tkinter is a built-in standard python library. With the help of Tkinter, many GUI applications can be created easily. There are various types of widgets available in Tkinter such as button, frame, label, menu, scrolledtext, canvas and many more. A widget is an element that provides various controls. ScrolledText widget is a text widget with a scroll bar. The tkinter.scrolledtext module provides the text widget along with a scroll bar. This widget helps the user enter multiple lines of text with convenience. Instead of adding a Scroll bar to a text widget, we can make use of a scrolledtext widget that helps to enter any number of lines of text.

Example 1 : Python code displaying scrolledText widget.

# Python program demonstrating
# ScrolledText widget in tkinter

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk
from tkinter import scrolledtext

# Creating tkinter main window
win = tk.Tk()
win.title("ScrolledText Widget")

# Title Label
ttk.Label(win,
          text = "ScrolledText Widget Example",
          font = ("Times New Roman", 15),
          background = 'green',
          foreground = "white").grid(column = 0,
                                     row = 0)

# Creating scrolled text
# area widget
text_area = scrolledtext.ScrolledText(win,
                                      wrap = tk.WORD,
                                      width = 40,
                                      height = 10,
                                      font = ("Times New Roman",
                                              15))

text_area.grid(column = 0, pady = 10, padx = 10)

# Placing cursor in the text area
text_area.focus()
win.mainloop()

Output :

Example 2 : ScrolledText widget making tkinter text Read only.

# Importing required modules

import tkinter as tk
import tkinter.scrolledtext as st

# Creating tkinter window
win = tk.Tk()
win.title("ScrolledText Widget")

# Title Label
tk.Label(win,
         text = "ScrolledText Widget Example",
         font = ("Times New Roman", 15),
         background = 'green',
         foreground = "white").grid(column = 0,
                                    row = 0)

# Creating scrolled text area
# widget with Read only by
# disabling the state
text_area = st.ScrolledText(win,
                            width = 30,
                            height = 8,
                            font = ("Times New Roman",
                                    15))

text_area.grid(column = 0, pady = 10, padx = 10)

# Inserting Text which is read only
text_area.insert(tk.INSERT,
"""\
This is a scrolledtext widget to make tkinter text read only.
Hi
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
Geeks !!!
""")

# Making the text read only
text_area.configure(state ='disabled')
win.mainloop()

Output :

In the first example, as you can see the cursor, the user can enter any number of lines of text. In the second example, the user can just read the text which is displayed in the text box and cannot edit/enter any lines of text. We may observe that the scroll bar disappears automatically if the text entered by the user is less than the size of the widget.