Tkinter ttk Themes

The main difference between Tkinter and ttk lies within the name of ttk, which is “Themed Tkinter”. As an extension of Tkinter, ttk introduces many new features, out of which one of them is the concept of “themes”.

In ttk, a theme is a collection of styling options and settings which effect the look and feel of all widgets in the tkinter window. There are various themes available by default, allowing us to change between themes with a single line of code.

Furthermore, we can also download more themes and have them inserted into your tkinter application.

Default ttk Themes

Luckily, ttk has a bunch of themes already available for us to pick from. We can get a complete list of available themes using the below code.

import tkinter as tk
import tkinter.ttk as ttk

class Window:
    def __init__(self, master):
        s = ttk.Style()
        print(s.theme_names())

root = tk.Tk()
window = Window(root)
root.mainloop()

('winnative', 'clam', 'alt', 'default', 'classic', 'vista', 'xpnative')

Bear in mind that the themes will vary from OS to OS. There are some themes available for all OS’s (e.g: “default” and “clam”), and some themes which are unique to some OS’s.

Look at the list above and try to guess which one’s are native to Windows (the OS on which this command was executed).

You can also find out which theme is currently in use with the following command.

import tkinter as tk
import tkinter.ttk as ttk

class Window:
    def __init__(self, master):
        s = ttk.Style()
        print(s.theme_use())

root = tk.Tk()
window = Window(root)
root.mainloop()

vista

Modifying Themes

If you want to modify certain things about a theme, then you can do so using the theme_settings() function.

This function takes two parameters, firstly the name of the function whose settings you wish to modify. Secondly, it takes a Dictionary which contains the names of all the widgets. And each of these widgets have a nested dictionary inside, with all the styling methods such as “configure and “map”. And even further, we have a nested dictionary for each styling method, which has a bunch of key : value pairs, such as "padding" : 5.

As you can see, modifying a theme in this manner is a bit tricky, but also efficient if you need to make alot of changes. In the case of small changes, the widgets and their styles can be accessed individually as explained in our ttk Styling Tutorial.

The following code modifies the styling options for the TButton style in the “default” theme.

import tkinter as tk
import tkinter.ttk as ttk

class Window:
    def __init__(self, master):
        self.master = master

        style = ttk.Style()
        style.theme_settings("default", {
           "TButton": {
               "configure": {"padding": 10},
               "map": {
                   "background": [("active", "yellow3"),
                                  ("!disabled", "yellow")],
                   "foreground": [("focus", "Red"),
                                  ("active", "green"),
                                  ("!disabled", "Blue")]
               }
           }
        })

        style.theme_use("default")

        button = ttk.Button(self.master, text = "Hello World")
        button.pack(padx = 5, pady = 5)

root = tk.Tk()
window = Window(root)
root.mainloop()

To summarize the changes made, the internal padding was increased to 10 and the background and foreground now change color based of the state of the widget. “active” means when the cursor is over it, “focus” is when the widget has been selected (pressed) and !disabled means any state but disabled.