Features of the Entry and Spinbox Widgets

The entry and spinbox widgets are very similar. They share many of the same features, attributes, and options. In fact, the spinbox widget is derived from the entry widget. Obviously, they have different behaviors and appearances. In the following discussion, I lump entry and spinbox widgets together to avoid having to repeat myself, but I’ll point out where the two widgets differ when necessary.

The entry widget displays a one-line, editable text string. By default, an entry’s string is empty. You can select all or part of an entry widget’s contents using the mouse, keyboard, or pro-grammatically using widget attributes and commands. If the text in an entry widget is too long to fit entirely within the widget’s window, only part of the text will be displayed. This much probably doesn’t surprise you. What you might not realize, though, is that you can change the view to display different portions of the text. A spinbox widget has all of the features of an entry widget plus the ability to allow users to spin through a fixed set of values (such as times or dates).