Starting and running .bat in background, tkinter in foreground

[ProfMeowintgon]

Hello,

as the title says, how can I achieve a (custom)tkinter window in the foreground (i.e. "maximized") and the cmd terminal which is started when running the bat in the background ("minimized")? I want the user to only see the Python GUI that I created, and not be distracted by some auxiliary cmd window.

I found this code when searching online:
if not DEFINED IS_MINIMIZED set IS_MINIMIZED=1 && start "" /min "%~dpnx0" %* && exit

which does indeed start the cmd window minimized, but also the customtkinter window.

[deanhystad]

How about no command window at all, not even minimized. Python can run a subprocess. If the subprocess creates a window, python can control if that window is visible or minimized, The subprocess can be a shell that runs your .bat script, or Python can do both the GUI and the things the bat script was doing. Can you provide more information about how the GUI and the .bat script are related?

[ProfMeowintgon]

That would be a nice solution, however I believe the bat script is necessary, the user doubleclicks a .bat called "StartGUI" which installs customtkinter, changes directory to the script location and then runs the script (python GUI.py). The .py file is used to create a customtkinter window with buttons etc.

[deanhystad]

How about making a python exe? No need to install a special tkinter or run a script to start the gui.

[ProfMeowintgon]

Would also be nice, but the company I created the script for won't allow running of "unknown" exe files (they must be added as exceptions on a case-by-case basis by the IT department, and I don't see them adding my script). So I have to live with the .bat file

[deanhystad]

That would be a nice solution, however I believe the bat script is necessary, the user doubleclicks a .bat called "StartGUI" which installs customtkinter, changes directory to the script location and then runs the script (python GUI.py). The .py file is used to create a customtkinter window with buttons etc.

This could all be done from the GUI.py file. Python programs can use subprocess to install the customtkinter package. This is a somewhat common pracitce. There is no need to change directories to the script location because there is no script. If you have to change directories, that is easy to do in python. After installing the customtkinter package the GUI.py program creates and shows the GUI window.

[ProfMeowintgon]

How do you mean? Can you give me some pointers how to achieve this? What do you mean "there is no script"? By "script" I also meant the .py script. If I double-click the .py, it takes me to VS Code, and it will probably be the same for others double-clicking on it.

[deanhystad]

I don't think you need a .bat script. Only the .py program. The python program can try to import the customtkinter module. If that fails it uses subprocess to run the pip install command. It then creates the GUI and shows the window.

When I double click on a .py file on my Windows machine it runs the python program in python. For a GUI program I change the extension to .pyw so it doesn't open a console window. I think I remember this being a checkbox in the python installer, but all you need to do is set a file association. I also have VS Code installed. VS Code doesn't even show up as an option when I right click on a .py file. I understand making Visual Studio the default option when clicking on a C++ file. Doesn't make much sense to do so for a Python script. You must have done something to associate .py files with VS Code.

[ProfMeowintgon]

I didn't know all I needed to do was rename it to .pyw to get rid of the console window. I also thought you could only run python scripts from the console, hence the .bat...

.pyw wasn't associated with Python, I had to fix it.

How can I import the customtkinter module from within the script? By the way, the customer has pretty tight firewalls, which is a bit problematic...

[deanhystad]

Read up on the subprocess library.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html

Here is an example using subprocess to call pip

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1233...ithin-code