In Tkinter is there any way to make a widget invisible?

Question

Something like this, would make the widget appear normally:

Label(self, text = 'hello', visible ='yes') 

While something like this, would make the widget not appear at all:

Label(self, text = 'hello', visible ='no') 

Answer 1

You may be interested by the pack_forget and grid_forget methods of a widget. In the following example, the button disappear when clicked

from Tkinter import *  def hide_me(event):     event.widget.pack_forget()  root = Tk() btn=Button(root, text="Click") btn.bind('<Button-1>', hide_me) btn.pack() btn2=Button(root, text="Click too") btn2.bind('<Button-1>', hide_me) btn2.pack() root.mainloop() 

Answer 2

One option, as explained in another answer, is to use pack_forget or grid_forget. Another option is to use lift and lower. This changes the stacking order of widgets. The net effect is that you can hide widgets behind sibling widgets (or descendants of siblings). When you want them to be visible you lift them, and when you want them to be invisible you lower them.

The advantage (or disadvantage...) is that they still take up space in their master. If you "forget" a widget, the other widgets might readjust their size or orientation, but if you raise or lower them they will not.

Here is a simple example:

import Tkinter as tk

class SampleApp(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        tk.Tk.__init__(self, *args, **kwargs)
        self.frame = tk.Frame(self)
        self.frame.pack(side="top", fill="both", expand=True)
        self.label = tk.Label(self, text="Hello, world")
        button1 = tk.Button(self, text="Click to hide label",
                           command=self.hide_label)
        button2 = tk.Button(self, text="Click to show label",
                            command=self.show_label)
        self.label.pack(in_=self.frame)
        button1.pack(in_=self.frame)
        button2.pack(in_=self.frame)

    def show_label(self, event=None):
        self.label.lift(self.frame)

    def hide_label(self, event=None):
        self.label.lower(self.frame)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = SampleApp()
    app.mainloop()

Answer 3

I know this is a couple of years late, but this is the 3rd Google response now for "Tkinter hide Label" as of 10/27/13... So if anyone like myself a few weeks ago is building a simple GUI and just wants some text to appear without swapping it out for another widget via "lower" or "lift" methods, I'd like to offer a workaround I use (Python2.7,Windows):

from Tkinter import *


class Top(Toplevel):
    def __init__(self, parent, title = "How to Cheat and Hide Text"):
        Toplevel.__init__(self,parent)
        parent.geometry("250x250+100+150")
        if title:
            self.title(title)
        parent.withdraw()
        self.parent = parent
        self.result = None
        dialog = Frame(self)
        self.initial_focus = self.dialog(dialog)
        dialog.pack()


    def dialog(self,parent):

        self.parent = parent

        self.L1 = Label(parent,text = "Hello, World!",state = DISABLED, disabledforeground = parent.cget('bg'))
        self.L1.pack()

        self.B1 = Button(parent, text = "Are You Alive???", command = self.hello)
        self.B1.pack()

    def hello(self):
        self.L1['state']="normal"


if __name__ == '__main__':
    root=Tk()   
    ds = Top(root)
    root.mainloop()

The idea here is that you can set the color of the DISABLED text to the background ('bg') of the parent using ".cget('bg')" http://effbot.org/tkinterbook/widget.htm rendering it "invisible". The button callback resets the Label to the default foreground color and the text is once again visible.

Downsides here are that you still have to allocate the space for the text even though you can't read it, and at least on my computer, the text doesn't perfectly blend to the background. Maybe with some tweaking the color thing could be better and for compact GUIs, blank space allocation shouldn't be too much of a hassle for a short blurb.

See Default window colour Tkinter and hex colour codes for the info about how I found out about the color stuff.