GUIs - A Modest Proposal

[Mark Roseman]

 "Martin v. Loewis" <martin at v.loewis.de> wrote:
> > To quote from the first section of the tutorial at http://www.tkdocs.com
> 
> Unfortunately, neither that tutorial nor your postings are really 
> specific on what those changes might be. So I'm skeptical that they 
> actually exist, or, if they exist, that Tkinter needs to change at all 
> to accomodate them.


Ok, take a look at the last section on this page then: 
    http://www.tkdocs.com/resources/backgrounder.html

The change is the new so-called 'themed' widget set (ttk), which 
complements but does not replace the standard widgets.  And yes, Tkinter 
would have to change a bit to use that widget set.  

Luckily enough, that work has also long been done (thanks to Guilherme 
Polo) and is a standard part of Tkinter as bundled with Python.

As for the changes that need to be made to Python application programs 
to use these 'ttk' widgets instead of the classic Tk ones, the TkDocs 
tutorial describes that in detail.

I trust that spending a few additional minutes with this material (or 
doing a Google search on 'ttk widgets') will help address your 
skepticism that changes were in fact made, and that these changes are 
being used everyday by developers working with Tk in Python, Ruby, Perl, 
Tcl and more.  

No question that awareness of these significant changes is far too low, 
and that perhaps some of the energy devoted to anxiety about Tkinter's 
shortcomings could be better spent learning about or communicating this 
information to developers who might easily benefit.

Mark