How to change the color of certain words in the tkinter text widget?

Question

I have a program that I want to be like the Python shell and change color of certain words when they are typed. Any help?

Answer 1

The main idea is to apply tags to the parts of text you want to customise. You can create your tags using the method tag_configure, with a specific style, and then you just need to apply this tag to the part of text you want to change using the method tag_add. You can also remove the tags using the method tag_remove.

The following is an example that uses tag_configure, tag_add and tag_remove methods.

#!/usr/bin/env python3  import tkinter as tk from tkinter.font import Font  class Pad(tk.Frame):      def __init__(self, parent, *args, **kwargs):         tk.Frame.__init__(self, parent, *args, **kwargs)          self.toolbar = tk.Frame(self, bg="#eee")         self.toolbar.pack(side="top", fill="x")          self.bold_btn = tk.Button(self.toolbar, text="Bold", command=self.make_bold)         self.bold_btn.pack(side="left")          self.clear_btn = tk.Button(self.toolbar, text="Clear", command=self.clear)         self.clear_btn.pack(side="left")          # Creates a bold font         self.bold_font = Font(family="Helvetica", size=14, weight="bold")          self.text = tk.Text(self)         self.text.insert("end", "Select part of text and then click 'Bold'...")         self.text.focus()         self.text.pack(fill="both", expand=True)          # configuring a tag called BOLD         self.text.tag_configure("BOLD", font=self.bold_font)      def make_bold(self):         # tk.TclError exception is raised if not text is selected         try:             self.text.tag_add("BOLD", "sel.first", "sel.last")                 except tk.TclError:             pass      def clear(self):         self.text.tag_remove("BOLD",  "1.0", 'end')   def demo():     root = tk.Tk()     Pad(root).pack(expand=1, fill="both")     root.mainloop()   if __name__ == "__main__":     demo() 

If you don't know what sel.first and sel.last are, check out this post or this reference.

Answer 2

I have made a chat client. I highlighted certain parts of the conversation using a custom quite easy to use Text widget that allows you to apply tags using regular expressions. It was based on the following post: How to highlight text in a tkinter Text widget.

Here you have an example of use:

# "text" is a Tkinter Text  # configuring a tag with a certain style (font color) text.tag_configure("red", foreground="red")  # apply the tag "red"  text.highlight_pattern("word", "red")