Update a Tkinter text widget as it's written rather than after the class is finished

Question

I'm in a bind, since this is being written on a classified machine I am unable to copy+paste here. Being somewhat a novice, my approach is probably unorthodox.

I have a GUI written in Tkinter with several buttons. Each button is linked to a class that, in effect, runs a short script. When the button is clicked, I inititalize a class log_window which is simply a Tkinter text widget. I then create a global variable linking log to the log_window I just created, and as the script runs I pipe sys.stdout/stderr to log (I created a write method specifically for this). Everything is kosher, except that the log_window text widget doesn't update with my piped stdout until after the class calling it is finished. However, if I simply print within the class, it will print in the order it is called.

Example

import Tkinter
from Tkinter import *
import time

class log_window:
    def __init__(self,master):
        self.textframe = Tkinter.Frame(master)
        self.text = Text(self.textframe)
        self.text.pack()
        self.textframe.pack()
    def write(self,text):
        self.text.insert(END,text)

class some_func1: # This effectively waits 5 seconds then prints both lines at once
    def __init__(self,master):
        log.write("some text")
        time.sleep(5)
        log.write("some text")

class some_func2: # This prints the first object, waits 5 seconds, then prints the second
    def __init__(self,master):
        print "some text"
        time.sleep(5)
        print "some text"

if __name__ == '__main__':
    global log    
    root = Tk()
    log = log_window(root)
    root.after(100,some_func1, root)
    root.after(100,some_func2, root)
    root.mainloop()

Sorry if my example is a little bit muffed, but I think it makes the point. The piping I do is through Popen and some system calls, but they aren't part of the issue, so I only highlighted what, I presume, is the LCD of the issue.

Answer 1

I don't know the details of Tkinter's concurrency, but fiddling around reveals that if you put

master.update_idletasks()

after each call to log.write, it updates on cue. You could give log a .flush() method to do that (like file handles have), or you could just make log.write call it after writing.