Tkinter in Python has native widgets (was: I am fed up with Python GUI toolkits...)

[Ben Finney]

Phlip <phlip2005 at gmail.com> writes:

> Tkinter sucks because it looks like an enfeebled Motif 1980s dawn-of-
> GUIs scratchy window with grooves and lines everywhere.

Applications have been written that look like that, sure. Many of them
were *written* in the 1980s and 1990s, so the wonder is not how they
look but that they still work today at all.

To continue supporting those old applications, written with the
assumption that the widgets will look like Motif, Tk must default to
looking like ugly old Motif.

But it simply is not true that Tk applications *must* look like Motif,
or even close. We have for a long time had the “themed Tk” extension
<URL:http://wiki.tcl.tk/14796> which makes themed and/or native widgets
in Tk.

Python's Tkinter has this at the ‘tkinter.ttk’ module
<URL:http://docs.python.org/py3k/library/tkinter.ttk.html>, or for
Python 2 at <URL:http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyttk>.

> Oh, and you can TDD it. Unlike some more "modern" GUIs I could
> mention...

Yes, the ability to test one's GUI from unit test code is a huge plus.

-- 
 \       “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not |
  `\            entitled to their own facts.” —US Senator Pat Moynihan |
_o__)                                                                  |
Ben Finney