Question

My Tkinter-based program needs to periodically perform some “heavy” maintenance functions.
Since it is a program that is running continuously, I was thinking of launching those functions only after a given amount of idle time.

How do you do it in Tkinter? I found about about after_idle in http://etutorials.org/Programming/Python+tutorial/Part+III+Python+Library+and+Extension+Modules/Chapter+16.+Tkinter+GUIs/16.9+Tkinter+Events/, but that gets called just when the event loop is idle. I need it to run my functions, say, after 10 minutes of idle time instead.

~~~

Mr.Steak gave the answer I needed – I just modified it slightly as follows to be able to perform different tasks at different intervals, using the idletime variable :

import time
from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()


def resetidle(*ignore): 
    global idletime
    for k in idletime: k['tlast']=None

def tick(*ignore):
    global idletime 
    t=time.time()   # the time in seconds since the epoch as a floating point number
    for k in idletime:
        if not k['tlast']:
            k['tlast'] = t
        else:
            if t-k['tlast']>k['tmax']:
                k['proc']()
                k['tlast'] = None
    root.after(5000, tick)   # reset the checks every 5''

idletime=[{'tlast':None,'tmax':60,'proc':test1},               # every 1'
      {'tlast':None,'tmax':3600,'proc':test2}]    # every 1h
root.after(5000, tick)
root.bind('<Key>', reset)
root.bind('<Button-1>', reset)
root.mainloop()

Answer 1

In the following example, the tick function is called every second. After 5 seconds, a message is printed, unless a key or mouse button 1 were pressed.

import time
from Tkinter import *

root = Tk()
running = None

def reset(*ignore): 
    global running
    running = None

def tick(*ignore):
    global running
    if not running:
        running = time.time()
    elif time.time() - running > 5:
        print 'I waited 5 seconds...'
        running = None
    root.after(1000, tick)   

root.after(1000, tick)    
root.bind('<Key>', reset)
root.bind('<Button-1>', reset)
root.mainloop()