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I was practicing tkinter with PyCharm for my own project with serial and arduino. Nothing special about it - few buttons, option-menu and labels. But I clicked on Mac's menu bar in the tkinter's GUI window on the option "Show tab bar". And then macbook had a reboot. After it - every script with tkinter's GUI reboots my macbook on executing. A blank window is shown for a second and then mac reboots. I'm using Mojave 10.14.6 (18G84)

I deleted python 3.7 interpreter from mac and reinstalled PyCharm. I cleared cache folders for python and PyCharm.

import tkinter
tkinter._test() # and it crashes now ever in this code...

UPD: updated MacOS to 10.14.6 (18G87) - still the same issue

Denis Omelchenko
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  • This sound like an OS bug. It seems to be a pretty common problem on some mac os versions. – Roland Smith Aug 07 '19 at 18:35
  • @RolandSmith well i guess i have to clear cache of Mac's GUI interpreter or something but it's just a guess idk. It hurts that I will have to switch to PyQt or else, I only recently started to understand tkinter :( – Denis Omelchenko Aug 07 '19 at 18:46
  • No user-space program (like Python) should be able to crash a modern operating system like macOS! If that happens, that's *by definition* an OS bug. – Roland Smith Aug 07 '19 at 19:04
  • @RolandSmith but Mac don't even recognise it as a crash! There are no crashlogs, no crash-after windows after rebooting, no data for me to search for the cause. – Denis Omelchenko Aug 07 '19 at 19:15
  • If the crash happens deep inside the kernel, it can be that it is simply not possible to write a crash log. The same goes for a hardware defect (e.g. memory). In my experience, hardware defects can easily just reboot the machine and leave no trace. – Roland Smith Aug 07 '19 at 19:23
  • I have a similar issue. One workaround for my problem is running the code as a 2.7 script. Still trying to get tkinter to work in python3 – David William Turnell Aug 19 '19 at 00:24
  • I just moved to Qt. It’s quite more complicated but after some research and training it feels super powerful (and, of course it IS working!) – Denis Omelchenko Aug 19 '19 at 06:02
  • yeah, I ended up learning kivy for the same reason (i would have learned QT but I like kivy's mobile support in case I ever want to distribute to IOS ) – David William Turnell Aug 20 '19 at 03:06

9 Answers9

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Seems to be a common problem python.org/download/mac/tcltk/#built-in-8-6-8 according to them

If you are using macOS 10.6 or later, the Apple-supplied Tcl/Tk 8.5 has serious bugs that can cause application crashes.

Rather than fixing TCL/TK I recommend you to want to reinstall a python version that satisfies the requirement & use it python.org/downloads/release/python-374

BPDESILVA
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Have you tried to downgrade tkinter to a version below the one causing a crash?

I.e going from 8.6.8 to 8.6.7 in conda can be done by executing:

conda install tk 8.6.7

this is all it took to fix an identical issue and error log, might also work with pip

Nik Pavlenko
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I ran into this issue on Mojave 10.14.6 after installing python 3.7.4 and tkinter 8.6.8 using Miniconda3.

Downgrading to python 3.7.0 fixed this issue for me.

conda install python=3.7.0
Max
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I have the same issue with python 3.7.0, tk 8.6.8 in anaconda3 in macOS 10.14.6: once I start my tk interface script the OS logs out without an error message showed or error report filed. Windows are also lost.

My problem was solved once I update to macOS 10.15.3. Tk is working properly and haven't spotted a new issue.

Adam Lyu
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A somewhat long explanation of the problem can be found here. It looks like you should avoid using a third party distributer of python.

I had the same problem. Your code made my computer crash. To fix it I had to install python from here. This will become your system's python 3.7 version. I uninstalled anaconda and used the system's 3.7 interpreter in PyCharm. Next, I had to start installing packages to make my code work. This may seem a bit tedius/difficult. Unfortunately, everything else I tried failed.

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Ivan Vazquez
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I was using a Conda virtual environment for python 2, switching to a System Interpreter solved the issue for me. If you don't have a System Interpreter, use 

$ brew install python@2

and use this interpreter to run the program. In PyCharm you would open your project, go to preferences -> project -> interpreter and select the 2.7 interpreter you installed.

Rfm0905
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Any system interpreter seems to work fine for me. As @Rfm0905 said, use brew to install the system interpreter if you do not have it. However, you can do this for any python version using brew install python${version}. This version, as far as I know, could be 3 (for python 3.7.5) or 2 (for python 2.7.4).

a_random_programmer
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I struggled with this same problem; code starts running (mac os 10.14.6 Mojave) and then I'm looking at my log in screen. After I log back in, PyCharm is also shutdown as is my chrome browser.

Here's what worked for me:

1) python 3.8.1 - I also got it running on python 3.6, so probably 3.7 would work, too.

2) Install ActiveTCL 8.6 - from ActiveState. Background ref is here.

3) I could not get any virtual environments to work with tkinter in PyCharm - I tried several iterations each of miniconda and virtualenv. The Python interpreter had to be the regular installed path - ie my path is /usr/local/binpython3.8 This could just be a quirk of my system...but I figured it could be useful for others.

Breen
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I meet the same problem, and I recently founded a solution.

First, open terminal and type "python" to enter in the python 2.7 provided by macOS.

Then type: 

 import Tkinter as tk
 print("Tk Version: {}".format(tk.Tk().eval('info patchlevel')))

Then it will pop up a normal tk window in python2.7 version and tk version 8.5.9. Then redo the same thing that crashes the python3's tk, that is "clicked on Mac's menu bar in the tkinter's GUI window on the option 'Show tab bar'". But this time, it will change to 'Hide tab bar'. After you click it, the tk's tab bar will disappear.

After that, your tk in python3 and tk version 8.6.x should operate normally.

I think this is a bug in macOS. When showing tab bar in tk version 8.6.x(not the tk 8.5.9 provided by macOS), the macOS will crashed. And the solution above is just canceled the showing of tab bar, so it's not 'really' solved the bug. So looks like you need to update to macOS 10.15 to really solve it. And that means you still not able to 'show tab bar' in macOS 10.14 with tk version 8.6.x.

ericgao4
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