Tkinter is in a mainloop
. Which basically means it’s constantly refreshing the window, waiting for buttons to be clicked, words to be typed, running callbacks, etc. When you run some code on the same thread that mainloop
is on, then nothing else is going to perform on the mainloop
until that section of code is done. A very simple workaround is spawning a long running process onto a separate thread. This will still be able to communicate with Tkinter and update it’s GUI (for the most part).
Here’s a simple example that doesn’t drastically modify your psuedo code:
import threading
class Gui:
[...]#costructor and other stuff
def refresh(self):
self.root.update()
self.root.after(1000,self.refresh)
def start(self):
self.refresh()
threading.Thread(target=doingALotOfStuff).start()
#outside
GUI = Gui(Tk())
GUI.mainloop()
This answer goes into some detail on mainloop
and how it blocks your code.
Here’s another approach that goes over starting the GUI on it’s own thread and then running different code after.