tkinter – How to drag and drop widgets?

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The behavior you’re observing is caused by the fact that the event’s coordinates are relative to the dragged widget. Updating the widget’s position (in absolute coordinates) with relative coordinates obviously results in chaos.

To fix this, I’ve used the .winfo_x() and .winfo_y() functions (which allow to turn the relative coordinates into absolute ones), and the Button-1 event to determine the cursor’s location on the widget when the drag starts.

Here’s a function that makes a widget draggable:

def make_draggable(widget):
    widget.bind("<Button-1>", on_drag_start)
    widget.bind("<B1-Motion>", on_drag_motion)

def on_drag_start(event):
    widget = event.widget
    widget._drag_start_x = event.x
    widget._drag_start_y = event.y

def on_drag_motion(event):
    widget = event.widget
    x = widget.winfo_x() - widget._drag_start_x + event.x
    y = widget.winfo_y() - widget._drag_start_y + event.y
    widget.place(x=x, y=y)

It can be used like so:

main = tk.Tk()

frame = tk.Frame(main, bd=4, bg="grey")
frame.place(x=10, y=10)
make_draggable(frame)

notes = tk.Text(frame)
notes.pack()

If you want to take a more object-oriented approach, you can write a mixin that makes all instances of a class draggable:

class DragDropMixin:
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super().__init__(*args, **kwargs)

        make_draggable(self)

Usage:

# As always when it comes to mixins, make sure to
# inherit from DragDropMixin FIRST!
class DnDFrame(DragDropMixin, tk.Frame):
    pass

# This wouldn't work:
# class DnDFrame(tk.Frame, DragDropMixin):
#     pass

main = tk.Tk()

frame = DnDFrame(main, bd=4, bg="grey")
frame.place(x=10, y=10)

notes = tk.Text(frame)
notes.pack()

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