How can I stop my Tkinter GUI from freezing when I click my button?

Question

As someone who is new to programming, I constantly find myself running into errors and issues and, while finding answers and solution, I rarely find out why it is that way.

Answer 1

the reason your Tk GUI freezes is because you have everything running on 1 thread. The mainloop is haulted by the submit function call which must be taking a "long time", so you probably see "Not Responding" appear in your Tk window when you click the button. To fix this, you need spawn a separate thread for submit to run in, so that the mainloop can keep doing it's thing and keep your Tk window from freezing.

this is done using threading. Instead of your button directly calling submit, have the button call a function that starts a new thread which then starts submit. Then create another functions which checks on the status of the submit thread. You can add a status bar too

import os
import time
from datetime import datetime
import shutil
import threading
from Tkinter import *
import ttk

def submit():
    time.sleep(5) # put your stuff here


def start_submit_thread(event):
    global submit_thread
    submit_thread = threading.Thread(target=submit)
    submit_thread.daemon = True
    progressbar.start()
    submit_thread.start()
    root.after(20, check_submit_thread)

def check_submit_thread():
    if submit_thread.is_alive():
        root.after(20, check_submit_thread)
    else:
        progressbar.stop()

root = Tk()
frame = ttk.Frame(root)
frame.pack()
progressbar = ttk.Progressbar(frame, mode='indeterminate')
progressbar.grid(column=1, row=0, sticky=W)

ttk.Button(frame, text="Check",
       command=lambda:start_submit_thread(None)).grid(column=0,    row=1,sticky=E)
root.mainloop()