How to make Tkinter columns of equal width when widgets span multiple columns (Python 2.7)

Question

In the following, the buttons labelled 'ONE', 'TWO', and 'THR' do not get evenly spaced out. It seems to me that the root of the problem is that Tk is assuming a default minimum width for any column containing part of a widget that spans multiple columns. However, this behaviour appears to be undocumented, so I am unsure how to accommodate for or adjust it in order to get the columns to be of equal width - including the two columns spanned by the text widget and the single column not spanned by the text widget - and thus space out the buttons evenly. I could kludge it by trial and error, i.e. padding out the latter column until it matches the former two, but that seems a poor solution.

EDIT: Following discussion below with @jwillis0720, I've added an extra column (3) and button ('FIV') to make the problem clearer. This question is about how to get columns the same width when some of those columns are spanned by multi-column widgets and others are not.

import Tkinter

master = Tkinter.Tk()

Tkinter.Button(master, text='ONE').grid(row=0, column=0)
Tkinter.Button(master, text='TWO').grid(row=0, column=1)
Tkinter.Button(master, text='THR').grid(row=0, column=2)
Tkinter.Button(master, text='FOU').grid(row=1, column=2)
Tkinter.Button(master, text='FIV').grid(row=0, column=3) # added as per above edit
Tkinter.Text(master).grid(row=1, column=0, columnspan=2)

master.mainloop()

Please note that using grid_columnconfigure with uniform does not solve this problem. Inserting the following lines (see answer to similar question here: How to create equal-width columns in Python 2.7 with Tkinter) simply makes the columns stretchy; they remain unevenly sized:

master.grid_columnconfigure(0, weight=1, uniform='a')
master.grid_columnconfigure(1, weight=1, uniform='a')
master.grid_columnconfigure(2, weight=1, uniform='a')
master.grid_columnconfigure(3, weight=1, uniform='a') # added as per above edit

Answer 1

I think you might want to use the sticky option.

sticky= Defines how to expand the widget if the resulting cell is larger than the widget itself. This can be any combination of the constants S, N, E, and W, or NW, NE, SW, and SE.

For example, W (west) means that the widget should be aligned to the left cell border. W+E means that the widget should be stretched horizontally to fill the whole cell. W+E+N+S means that the widget should be expanded in both directions. Default is to center the widget in the cell.

import Tkinter

master = Tkinter.Tk()

Tkinter.Button(master, text='ONE').grid(row=0, column=0, sticky='NW')
Tkinter.Button(master, text='TWO').grid(row=0, column=1, sticky='NW')
Tkinter.Button(master, text='THR').grid(row=0, column=2, sticky='NW')
Tkinter.Button(master, text='FOU').grid(row=1, column=2)
Tkinter.Text(master).grid(row=1, column=0, columnspan=2)


master.mainloop()

Edit

What does it look like. Mine looks like this evenly spaced except the text widget takes up two columns as specified.

Answer 2

old post I know, but I also struggled to get the columns and rows to maintain a common width/height so I thought I would share my solution

newish to python and tkinter, so if there are any mistakes please let me know

I created a grid manager, this allowed the main window and any frame to be setup with evenly spaced columns and rows, it's not 100% but for what I was using it for it worked well, it was especially useful during the building phase

one downside when creating a frame is the maximum number of rows/columns of the frame must be equal to or less than the number or rows/columns it is spanning, otherwise it goes a bit weird (nut sure why)

hope this helps

import tkinter

class grid_manager:
    def __init__(self, Frame, colour = "gray94"):
        self.Frame = Frame
        self.Colour = colour

    def set_grid(self, numofRows, numofColumns, borderwidth = 1):
        self.numofRows = numofRows
        self.numofColumns = numofColumns
        self.borderwidth = borderwidth
        for i in range(numofRows):
            for j in range(numofColumns):
                canvas = tkinter.Canvas(self.Frame)
                canvas.config(relief="raised", borderwidth=self.borderwidth)   #comment out to hide grid layout
                canvas.grid(row=i, column=j)
                canvas.config(background=self.Colour)
                self.Frame.columnconfigure(j, weight=1)
            self.Frame.rowconfigure(i, weight=1)

mainwindow = tkinter.Tk()

mainwindow.title("Test")
mainwindow.geometry("640x480-8-200")
mainGrid = grid_manager(mainwindow)
mainGrid.set_grid(10, 10)

header_Frame = tkinter.Frame(mainwindow)
header_Frame.grid(row=0, column=0, columnspan=10, sticky="nsew")
headerGrid = grid_manager(header_Frame)
headerGrid.set_grid(numofRows=1, numofColumns=10, borderwidth=5)

footerFrame = tkinter.Frame(mainwindow)
footerFrame.grid(row=9, column=0, columnspan=10, sticky="nsew")
footerGrid = grid_manager(footerFrame, "red")
footerGrid.set_grid(numofRows=1, numofColumns=10, borderwidth=5)

rightFrame = tkinter.Frame(mainwindow)
rightFrame.grid(row=1, column=5, rowspan=5, columnspan=5, sticky="nsew")
rightGrid = grid_manager(rightFrame, "blue")
rightGrid.set_grid(numofRows=5, numofColumns=5, borderwidth=2)

leftFrame = tkinter.Frame(mainwindow)
leftFrame.grid(row=3, column=0, rowspan=5, columnspan=4, sticky="nsew")
leftGrid = grid_manager(leftFrame, "yellow")
leftGrid.set_grid(numofRows=5, numofColumns=4, borderwidth=2)

mainwindow.mainloop()

enter image description here

Answer 3

import tkinter

master = tkinter.Tk()

tkinter.Button(master, text='ONE                ').grid(row=0, column=3, sticky='NW')
tkinter.Button(master, text='TWO               ').grid(row=1, column=3, sticky='NW')
tkinter.Button(master, text='THR                ').grid(row=2, column=3, sticky='NW')
tkinter.Button(master, text='FOU                ').grid(row=3, column=3, sticky='NW')
tkinter.Text(master).grid(column=30, columnspan=10)