Tkinter window says (not responding) but code is running
python, python-3.x, tkinter, user-interface
Solution
While you can call root.update() in your loop, this will still produce some (potentially) undesirable side-effects.
- The program may act laggy, meaning it takes a long time to respond to user input.
- You will only be able to run this one action. Any other action has to wait for this to finish.
As an alternative I would suggest that you implement simple multi-threading. Python multithreading is pretty simple, and will prevent both of these drawbacks. You will be able to execute your long running code, while still providing a clean and responsive UI.
If your application is trivially parallelizable, you could use multiple threads to decrease running time. Ex. Thread 1 handles entries 1-100, while thread 2 handles entries 101-200.
Problem
I have a program that runs a long process after you click an action button. As the process is running the root window will say that it is not responding even though I know the program is running in the background. This program is going to be released to a few people that I work with and I want to make sure they don't freak out and close the window when they see this. The solution I have is sitting a root.update in the loop of the process that is running but I am not sure this was the best fix. Using the python 3.3 Here is a sample of the code so you get an idea of what I am doing, this is called from the main loop: ``` def combine(boxes_to, boxes_from, frame): to_value,to_pos = gui.checkBoxes(boxes_to) from_value,from_pos = gui.checkBoxes(boxes_from) frame.destroy() running = Label(root,text="Running please do not close..",font = (16)) running.pack() root.update() map_to = open("map_to",'r') for line in map_to: root.update() process(line) running.destroy() map_to.close() finish = Button(root, text="Done",command=gui.stop) finish.pack() ```