Standard Themes in ttk

The 4 themes common to tkinter can be found where your python program is installed under the directory python36/tcl/tk8.6/ttk. They are listed with their own name plus"Theme" suffixed with ".tcl", apart from default which is listed as defaults.tcl.

• altTheme.tcl

• aquaTheme.tcl

• clamTheme.tcl

• classicTheme.tcl

• defaults.tcl

• vistaTheme.tcl

• winTheme.tcl

• xpTheme.tcl

Viewing the Theme files

There are obvious differences between the tcl and python languages but we can recognise some commands such as map and configure, we can also spot the element and state names. A new part of the mix is when we look at the OS specific themes, such as aqua or vista, they have variables that are system dependant. Even so we should be able to recognise how some of our scripts will respond.

It would seem that the common themes allow us to modify all the components and elements and are able to give the widest possible support to any style alterations we wish to make. Contrast what happened when we tried to modify one of the OS dependant themes and we required a less straightforward approach in 02Entry.py. On the other hand the OS specific themes look up-to-date and ready to use as is.

Buttons Created in Standard Themes

Using 03state_themes.py in selected State

alt	clam	classic	default	vista

So far we have seen that the ttk themes achieve uniformity across all widgets, by using common changes on dynamic states, also by using the same element name within a widget or from widget to widget. A third aid to uniformity is by using using descriptive colour aliases rather than the colour names or hash values.

As stated at the beginning there are remarkably few instances of the more interesting style changes found when trawling the internet. Up until this point most of the examples could have been made referring "Tkinter 8.5 reference: a GUI for Python". The few instances I did find that displayed rounded corners and shadow effects I will reproduce here.