Tkinter keeps crashing on Tk() on Mac

Question

I've encountered a problem while attempting to create a Tkinter window using root = tk.Tk() . Every time I get to that point, the program crashes, and "Python quit unexpectedly" message is displayed.

I get no tracebacks at all, so I assume that is the ActiveTcl bug. However, I have the new distribution from ActiveTcl Website installed, which is supposed to take care of the problem (obviously, it doesn't).

Interestingly enough, it only crashes when it is executed in Python 2.7. It works fine in Python 3.6. However, I need to use 2.7.

My MacOS version is 10.12.5.

Any ideas / suggestions about fixing the issue are welcome.

P.S. I have read a good dozen of similar posts before posting this, and not any of the proposed solutions worked for me. Please consider this before marking this post as a duplicate.

Answer 1

Tkinter needs to be imported like this in order to work with both python 2 and 3:

try:
    import tkinter
except ImportError:    # python 2
    import Tkinter as tkinter

Answer 2

Are you running Python 3 through Anaconda? Tkinter was acting all sorts of funky on me and then I uninstalled Anaconda and now it works fine.

Interestingly enough, I am running a PyCharm Professional / Anaconda combo on a Windows 10 VM on my Mac, and I have issues with Tkinter on it as well. I have absolutely no issues however on my Linux Mint box.

To reiterate, I was able to remove the issue by completely removing Anaconda. (How to uninstall Anaconda completely from macOS)

Answer 3

I don't know what is meant by "new distribution" for ActiveTcl is but if you're using 8.6, it needs to be downgraded to 8.5.

Also, if you run IDLE which uses Tkinter, do you see any messages warning of "instability"? If you see that then, it means you need to downgrade Tcl to 8.5.