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Want a Text widget that scrolls without the extra hassle of manually adding scrollbars?

You’re in luck.

This beginner-friendly guide will walk you through Tkinter’s ScrolledText widget — step by step with code, clear explanations, and some fun along the way.

🤔 What is Tkinter ScrolledText?

ScrolledText is like a Text widget’s cooler sibling.

It comes preloaded with a vertical scrollbar — so you don’t need to wire up a scrollbar manually.

Imagine you’re building a chat app or a log viewer — where lots of text keeps piling up.

You’ll want it to scroll automatically, right?

That’s where ScrolledText shines.

🔧 How to Create a ScrolledText Widget

Let’s break it down.

Step 1: Import ScrolledText

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter.scrolledtext import ScrolledText

✅ It’s not in tkinter directly. You import it from tkinter.scrolledtext.

Step 2: Create the Widget

root = tk.Tk()
text = ScrolledText(root, width=80, height=10)

root is your parent window or frame.

You can configure things like width, height, font, etc.

Step 3: Pack it

text.pack(padx=10, pady=10, fill=tk.BOTH, expand=True)

And — you’ve got a scrolling text area.

🧪 Full Example — ScrolledText in Action

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter.scrolledtext import ScrolledText

root = tk.Tk()
root.title("ScrolledText Demo")

text = ScrolledText(root, width=80, height=10)
text.pack(padx=10, pady=10, fill=tk.BOTH, expand=True)

root.mainloop()

📥 ScrolledText Get Text

Let’s say you want to grab whatever the user typed.

user_input = text.get("1.0", tk.END)
print(user_input)

• "1.0" means line 1, character 0 — the very beginning
• tk.END means all the way to the end (including that final newline)

📝 ScrolledText Set Text

Want to prefill the box? Here’s how:

text.insert(tk.END, "Welcome to my awesome app!")

text.delete("1.0", tk.END)
text.insert(tk.END, "New content goes here!")

If you want to replace everything:

⬇️ Tkinter ScrolledText Scroll to Bottom

Great for chat logs or real-time data feeds.

text.see(tk.END)

🔒 Tkinter ScrolledText Read Only

Don’t want users to edit the text?

Set the state to "disabled":

text.config(state="disabled")

If you need to update the text later, temporarily enable it:

text.config(state="normal")
text.insert(tk.END, "Appended text!\n")
text.config(state="disabled")

🧰 Useful ScrolledText Methods

Since ScrolledText is a subclass of Text, you can use all Text widget methods: