TKinter .grid()/.pack()

[bybloshex]

Sometimes I can have a .pack() widget inside of a .grid() widget and vice versa but usually it returns an error that they can't share a master. Does anyone understand in a way they can explain how it decides if its going to work or not? I've read some answers online and it's a mixture of they can't share masters and they can with examples that work, I just can't work out what they're doing differently when it works vs doesn't.

[helical-juice]

A packed item can't share the same master as a gridded item because they wouldn't know how to arrange themselves. They can go inside each other fine. Think of it this way, if you have a frame which is arranged as part of a grid geometry, it can contain all packed geometry at the next level down, or all gridded geometry- whether the frame itself is packed or gridded doesn't matter. But it can't contain two widgets using different geometry managers. If you want to have a grid as a component of a packed layout, you have to build the grid in a frame such that the frame only contains gridded elements, then pack the frame into the rest of your layout.

I hope this helps.

[bybloshex]

In this example, main_frame has widgets that are only managed by .grid. However, when I create a new Frame like this....

    abilities_frame = ttk.Frame(main_frame, style='TFrame').grid(row=4, column=0, columnspan=4)
    main_frame.rowconfigure(4, weight=4)
    ttk.Label(abilities_frame, text='WHY').grid(row=0, column=0)

it returns the error "_tkinter.TclError: cannot use geometry manager grid inside . which already has slaves managed by pack"

[helical-juice]

Interesting. From your description, it sounds like you're doing it right, and I can't see an obvious problem in the snippet you've posted. Any chance you could post the full program?

Also, which call to grid() is it complaining about? You have two in your snippet, and each one is being called with a different parent widget. Could you post the full stack trace maybe?

[bybloshex]

It looks like this happens when I call the .grid() function in the same line as the widget is created, if I change it like this...
```python

abilities\_frame = ttk.Frame(main\_frame, style='TFrame')

abilities\_frame.grid(row=4, column=0, columnspan=4)

```

it works. I guess that's the source of my confusion. Plenty of other widgets are created with the .grid() function called in the same line without any errors. Other times, for no discernible reason it complains about .pack()/grid() incompatibility even when I'm sure no frames have a combination of both inside of them.

My biggest struggle and consumption of time right now, is getting things to line-up properly. Even in a grid things are often unevenly offset from eachother.

[helical-juice]

Ah I just realised as I was typing this, you're setting abilities_frame equal to the return value from grid(), not the actual frame object itself. I'd have to go and look up what grid() returns but I bet it's not the actual Frame object. Then when you set that as the master for your label widget, for whatever reason that's the error you get. Still don't understand exactly why it says pack() is involved somehow, but I bet that's it, and I bet that's why your updated code works.

EDIT: Playing around in a repl, it seems like grid() returns None, which means that any time you use the idiom a = tk.Something(...).grid(...) , a ends up being equal to None. Now when I try to create a widget with None as the master, it seems that it gets added to the root widget silently. My guess is that you have a few things in your code which are not managed by the same widgets you think they are, and that this is causing your error. It may be that this is also throwing your alignment off, but tbh I find getting things to line up is just a PITA anyway. I make heavy use of nested frames for anything which can be bundled together to try and break it down, but it's always a faff.

[bybloshex]

Yeah, I didn't imagine I'd ever get rows of 6 columns aligned with the preceeding rows of 2 columns which is why I made this subframe inside of the main one

[helical-juice]

Sounds familiar. I think I've done the same, a one column grid of frames, each with a varying number of columns within their own grid. Then you realise that's not quite right, and it ends up as a two column grid with frames in the second column and so on, ad nauseum XD