Changing the cursor icon

Tkinter allows you to customize the cursor icon while hovering over a widget. This behavior is sometimes enabled by default, like the Entry widget that displays an I-beam pointer.

Getting ready

The following application shows how to display a busy cursor while it is performing a long-running operation, and a cursor with a question mark, typically used in help menus:

How to do it...

The mouse pointer icon can be changed using the cursor option. In our example, we used the watch value to display the native busy cursor and question_arrow to display the regular arrow with a question mark:

import tkinter as tk

class App(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.title("Cursors demo")
        self.resizable(0, 0)
        self.label = tk.Label(self, text="Click the button to start")
        self.btn_launch = tk.Button(self, text="Start!",
                                    command=self.perform_action)
        self.btn_help = tk.Button(self, text...