you will need the package and its dependencies.

since you mentioned synaptic, you must be using a Debian based system. one way to get what you need:

sudo apt-get install python-tk

If, like me, you don’t have root privileges on your network because of your wonderful friends in I.S., and you are working in a local install you may have some problems with the above approaches.

I spent ages on Google – but in the end, it’s easy.

Download the tcl and tk from http://www.tcl.tk/software/tcltk/download.html and install them locally too.

To install locally on Linux (I did it to my home directory), extract the .tar.gz files for tcl and tk. Then open up the readme files inside the ./unix directory. I ran

cd ~/tcl8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/cnel711 --exec-prefix=/home/cnel711
make
make install

cd ~/tk8.5.11/unix
./configure --prefix=/home/cnel711 --exec-prefix=/home/cnel711 --with-tcl=/home/cnel711/tcl8.5.11/unix
make
make install

It may seem a pain, but the files are tiny and installation is very fast.

Then re-run python setup.py build and python setup.py install in your python installation directory – and it should work. It worked for me – and I can now import Tkinter etc to my heart’s content – yipidy-yay. An entire afternoon spent on this – hope this note saves others from the pain.

If you are using Python 3 it might be because you are typing Tkinter not tkinter

Actually, you just need to use the following to install the tkinter for python3:

sudo apt-get install python3-tk

In addition, for Fedora users, use the following command:

sudo dnf install python3-tkinter

For Python 2.7:

As it says here,

You don’t need to download Tkinter – it’s an integral part of all Python distributions (except binary distributions for platforms that don’t support Tcl/Tk).

In my case, on Windows, what helped was reinstalling the Python distribution. A long time ago, I had unchecked the "Tcl/Tk" installation feature. After reinstalling, all works fine and I can import _tkinter and import Tkinter.

If you’re using Python 3 then you must install as follows:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-tk

Tkinter for Python 2 (python-tk) is different from Python 3‘s (python3-tk).

If you’re using RHEL, CentOS, Oracle Linux, etc. You can use yum to install tkinter module

yum install tkinter

There is _tkinter and Tkinter – both work on Py 3.x
But to be safe- Download Loopy and change your python root directory(if you’re using an IDE like PyCharms) to Loopy’s installation directory. You’ll get this library and many more.

For Arch Linux users, it goes a bit like

sudo pacman -S tk

tk-devel also needs to be installed in my case

yum install -y tkinter tk-devel

install these and rebuild python

The situation on macOS is still a bit complicated, but do-able:

Python.org strongly suggest downloading tkinter from ActiveState, but you should read their license first (hint: don’t redistribute or want Support).

When the download is opened OS X 10.11 rejected it because it couldn’t find my receipt: “ActiveTcl-8.6.pkg can’t be opened because it is from an unidentified developer”.

I followed an OSXDaily fix from 2012 which suggested allowing from anywhere. But OS X has now added an “Open Anyway” option to allow (e.g.) Active-Tcl as a once off, and the “Anywhere” option has gained a timeout.

Fedora release 25 (Twenty Five)

dnf install python3-tkinter

This worked for me.

Tkinter is a GUI module for python. you can use it to make GUI based applications in python. Tkinter provides several GUI widgets like buttons,menu, canvas,text,frame,label etc. to develop desktop applications.Though Tkinter is very popular and is included with windows, macosx install of python, There are also alternative choices like pyQt, wxPython…

In this tutorial we will see how to install it on linux and use it with an example.

First, check if you have python installed and also check its version

Open up your terminal and type python. if its installed then it will show information like version, help… check your version (mine is python 2.7.9)

aman@vostro:~$ python
Python 2.7.9 (default, Apr 2 2015, 15:33:21)
[GCC 4.9.2] on linux2
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.

If you don’t have python then install it
sudo apt-get install python

If you want to install python 3 then enter the following. If you are a newbie, I would recommend python 2 instead of python 3. Python 2 is still very popular and many apps are made on it. On ubuntu python2 is still the default
sudo apt-get install python3

Finally, Install Tkinter

sudo apt-get install python-tk

for python 3

sudo apt-get install python3-tk

How to Use it

Now, lets check if Tkinter is working well with this little example

open your terminal and enter into your python shell.
python

for python3
python3

if python was installed correctly you will get a >>> prompt.
aman@vostro:~$ python

Python 2.7.9 (default, Apr  2 2015, 15:33:21)
[GCC 4.9.2] on linux2

Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Now import Tkinter module. it wont show any error if it got imported correctly. NOTE: Make sure you type Tkinter (not tkinter) in python2 and tkinter (not Tkinter) in python3.

>>>import Tkinter

Now, just to check you can create an empty window using Tkinter.

>>>Tkinter.Tk()

for python3 user, install python3-tk package by following command

sudo apt-get install python3-tk


For python 3.7 on ubuntu I had to use sudo apt-get install python3.7-tk to make it work

For Fedora >= 25 and python >= 3, we might need to include the dependencies for Tkinter

sudo dnf install python3-tkinter

I think you have to install the tkinter onto your code repository directory.

For liunx (Ubuntu or debian), open the terminal.
Install the tkinter package by running this command on the terminal.

sudo apt-get install python-tk 

After installing the python-tk package on the terminal, create a new python file. Call it filename.py.

On the first line of the filename.py, import tkinter into the python file.

import tkinter

To create a tkinter with different fields, you can use this tutorial.
https://www.delftstack.com/tutorial/tkinter-tutorial/

The documentation of tkinter can be found here:
https://docs.python.org/3.7/library/tkinter.html

Hope that helps. Do ask us if you are still stuck.
Remember to identify what you need in the GUI on tkinter before implementing it. Drawing wireframes of how the GUI will look like will help in coding the Tkinter GUI.

You only need to import it:

import tkinter as tk

then you will be use the phrase tk, which is shorter and easier.

Also, I prefer using messagebox too:

from tkinter import messagebox as msgbx

Here’s some ways you will be able to use it.

# make a new window
window = tk.Tk()

# show popup
msgbx.showinfo("title", "This is a text")

Install python version 3.6+
and open you text editor
or ide
write sample code like this:

from tkinter import *

root = Tk()
root.title("Answer")

root.mainloop()

Use ntk for your desktop application, which work on top of tkinter to give you more functional and good looking ui in less codding.

install ntk by pip install ntk

proper Documentation in here: ntk.readthedocs.io

Happy codding.

Even after you’ve successfully imported python3 and python3-tk, it still might not work. I changed the first line of my script from:
#! /usr/bin/python
to:
#! /usr/bin/python3

It finally worked!

For Ubuntu users and Linux users in general, it’s not a bad idea to read the tips I’ve found here:

0: Do NOT purge Python from your system otherwise it’s very likely you go through hell to re-install the things you will miss, including the ubuntu-desktop.

1: Update your local software repository

sudo apt update

2: Install the stuff everybody needs:

sudo apt install software-properties-common

3: Add the Dead Snake to your repository list:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa

4: Update the entire thing again because we installed stuff and added a new repo:

sudo apt update

5: Install the Python version you want:

sudo apt install python3.10

6: Check that the version you want was installed:

python3 --version

Finally, you might want to restart your PC.

To install the Tkinter on popular Linux distros:

Debian/Ubuntu:

sudo apt install python3-tk -y  

Fedora:

sudo dnf install -y python3-tkinter

Arch:

sudo pacman -Syu tk --noconfirm 

REHL/CentOS6/CentOS7:

sudo yum install -y python3-tkinter

OpenSUSE:

sudo zypper in -y python-tk

You can simply install it by your package manager(pip). If you haven’t installed pip yet you can download the latest version of it.

And to download tkinter

pip install tkinter

And if you are maybe using a few versions of python, you can install it in the specific version you are currently using. if it’s 3.10, it is,

pip3.10 install tkinter