Quickstart

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

from tkinter_icons import MaterialIcon

root = tk.Tk()

home = MaterialIcon("home", size=24, color="#0d6efd")
ttk.Button(root, text="Home", image=home.image, compound="left").pack(padx=20, pady=20)

root.mainloop()

That is the shape of every icon in every pack: a name, a size, a color, and .image where a widget wants a picture. Three things trip people up first, and they are the rest of this page.

Every pack imports from tkinter_icons

Whichever pack you installed, its class comes from the same place — LucideIcon, FontAwesomeIcon, WeatherIcon, all from tkinter_icons. Switching sets is a one-line change.

Ask for a pack you have not installed and you get instructions rather than a puzzle:

from tkinter_icons import WeatherIcon
# ImportError: The Weather Icons pack is not installed.
#
#   pip install "tkinter-icons[weather]"
#
# Then: from tkinter_icons import WeatherIcon

Keep a reference

This is a Tk rule rather than one of ours: a PhotoImage that nothing refers to is garbage collected, and the widget shows an empty box. Holding the icon object is enough, because it holds the image.

# Wrong: nothing holds the icon, so nothing holds its image.
ttk.Button(root, image=MaterialIcon("home").image).pack()

# Right: the icon lives as long as the object holding it.
self.home = MaterialIcon("home")
ttk.Button(root, image=self.home.image).pack()

It catches everyone once. tkinter and ttk has the same rule stated where it usually bites — menus and trees, which outlive the function that built them.

Finding icon names

Names are the upstream project’s own, and not always the word you would pick — Material Design Icons calls the gear cog, not settings. Rather than guess, run the browser:

tkinter-icons

It shows every installed set, searchable, at the size and color you will actually use, with a button that copies the name. See Icon browser.

Next

• Icons and names — what an icon actually is, how names resolve against styles, and why building one costs nothing

• Stateful icons — icons that follow a widget’s hover and disabled colors

• Choosing a pack — if [material] is not the set you want