Tkinter window focus on Mac OS X

Question

I'm writing an application in Python with the Tkinter GUI framework. It listens for keyboard and mouse events, so it must have focus. When it is launched from a terminal in Ubuntu, the following code works:

from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()
root.focus_force()

def key(event):
    print "pressed", event.char

def callback(event):
    print "clicked at", event.x, event.y 

frame = Frame(root, width=100, height=100)
frame.bind("<Key>", key)
frame.bind("<Button-1>", callback)
frame.pack()
frame.focus_force()

root.mainloop()

However, when launched from a terminal in Mac OS X 10.8.4 (stock Python 2.7.2), focus is retained by the terminal emulator until the user clicks on the window. Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

score 15 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 20 '14 at 03:39

I tried this and it worked well for me:

from os import system
from platform import system as platform

# set up your Tk Frame and whatnot here...

if platform() == 'Darwin':  # How Mac OS X is identified by Python
    system('''/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to set frontmost of process "Python" to true' ''')

Of course, that'll bring your entire application to the front, not just a specific window, but after you do that, you can then use focus_force() on a specific frame or window and that'll get moved to become the frontmost of all your application windows.

For those interested, I didn't write the system() call myself. I found it in this thread on SourceForge.

The fact that I put the system() call within an if block that verifies this is running on OS X makes the solution cross platform - my understanding is that focus_force() works on all other platforms exactly as you want, and just performing it after the system() invocation wouldn't cause any problems in OS X, either.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Nov 23 '14 at 15:06

came here wondering the same question, but I found this wise sounding answer from Kevin Walzer which suggests to use py2app:

Yes, this is standard behavior for OS X. Running an app in Terminal keeps focus in the Terminal unless you switch by clicking windows. The Command-Tab behavior is determined by the windowing system, not by a newly spawned process.

The way around this is to wrap your application up in a standard Mac app bundle using py2app. The average Mac user isn't going to launch a Python-based game from the command line.

Kevin

(from https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.lang.python/ZPO8ZN5dx3M)

You can also use [pyinstaller](http://www.pyinstaller.org/). I like it since I can make both Mac App bundles and Windows executables. — Fiver, Dec 07 '13 at 19:11

score -1 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 23 '13 at 22:15

Do wait_visibility and event_generate help ?

eg. something like -

from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()

def key(event):
    print "pressed", event.char

def callback(event):
    print "clicked at", event.x, event.y 

frame = Frame(root, width=100, height=100)
frame.bind("<Key>", key)
frame.bind("<Button-1>", callback)
frame.pack()

frame.focus_set()

root.wait_visibility()
root.event_generate('<Button-1>', x=0, y=0)

root.mainloop()

Tkinter window focus on Mac OS X

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