How to make a Tkinter window jump to the front?

Assuming you mean your application windows when you say "my other windows", you can use the lift() method on a Toplevel or Tk:

root.lift()

If you want the window to stay above all other windows, use:

root.attributes("-topmost", True)

Where root is your Toplevel or Tk. Don't forget the - infront of "topmost"!

To make it temporary, disable topmost right after:

def raise_above_all(window):
    window.attributes('-topmost', 1)
    window.attributes('-topmost', 0)

Just pass in the window you want to raise as a argument, and this should work.

Add the following lines before the mainloop():

root.lift()
root.attributes('-topmost',True)
root.after_idle(root.attributes,'-topmost',False)

It works perfectly for me. It makes the window come to the front when the window is generated, and it won't keep it always be in the front.

Regarding the Mac, I noticed there can be a problem in that if there are multiple python GUIs running, every process will be named "Python" and AppleScript will tend to promote the wrong one to the front. Here's my solution. The idea is to grab a list of running process IDs before and after you load Tkinter. (Note that these are AppleScript process IDs which seem to bear no relation to their posix counterparts. Go figure.) Then the odd man out will be yours and you move that one to frontmost. (I didn't think that loop at the end would be necessary, but if you simply get every process whose ID is procID, AppleScript apparently returns the one object identified by name, which of course is that non-unique "Python", so we are back to square one unless there's something I'm missing.)

import Tkinter, subprocess
def applescript(script):
    return subprocess.check_output(['/usr/bin/osascript', '-e', script])
def procidset():
    return set(applescript(
        'tell app "System Events" to return id of every process whose name is "Python"'
        ).replace(',','').split())
idset = procidset()
root = Tkinter.Tk()
procid = iter(procidset() - idset).next()
applescript('''
    tell app "System Events"
        repeat with proc in every process whose name is "Python"
            if id of proc is ''' + procid + ''' then
                set frontmost of proc to true
                exit repeat
            end if
        end repeat
    end tell''')

If you're doing this on a Mac, use AppleEvents to give focus to Python. Eg:

import os

os.system('''/usr/bin/osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to set frontmost of process "Python" to true' ''')