Which file formats can I use for tkinter icons?

Question

I know this might be obvious, but in tkinter you can set an icon, but I have found it really hard to find one. I just wanted to know if you have to use the .ico

Answer 1

I was struggling a lot to find an answer too but finally I peeked into the source code of idle3.6 where I found the following piece of code:

# set application icon
icondir = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'Icons')
if system() == 'Windows':
    iconfile = os.path.join(icondir, 'idle.ico')
    root.wm_iconbitmap(default=iconfile)
else:
    ext = '.png' if TkVersion >= 8.6 else '.gif'
    iconfiles = [os.path.join(icondir, 'idle_%d%s' % (size, ext))
                 for size in (16, 32, 48)]
    icons = [PhotoImage(master=root, file=iconfile)
             for iconfile in iconfiles]
    root.wm_iconphoto(True, *icons)

I searched through all files in the idlelib folder for .ico and .png using the rummage software.

So finally I managed to get the window icon working (on GNU-linux with TkVersion>=8.6) with the following two lines:

icon = PhotoImage(master=root, file='icon.png')
root.wm_iconphoto(True, icon)

where I put the icon directly in my application folder.

From the idle code it seems to me that on Windows still only .ico files are supported.