ttkthemes documentation¶

A group of themes for the ttk extenstions for Tkinter gathered together by RedFantom and created by various authors.

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Authors¶

The ttkthemes package contains many different themes created by many different authors. Some themes are even derived from other software, like GTK-themes.

GNU GPLv3 Themes¶

arc: Copyright (c) 2015 Sergei Golovan
equilux: Copyright (C) 2018 RedFantom
itft1: Copyright (C) 2005 Jelco Huijser
ubuntu: Copyright (C) Regents of the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Scriptics Corporation, and other parties. Copyright (C) 2018 RedFantom

Tcl-License Themes¶

aquativo: Copyright (C) 2004 Pat Thoyts
black: Copyright (c) 2007-2008 Mats Bengtsson
blue: Copyright (C) 2004 Pat Thoyts
clearlooks: Copyright Regents of the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Scriptics Corporation, and other parties
elegance: Copyright Regents of the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Scriptics Corporation, and other parties
keramik and keramik_alt: Copyright (C) 2004 Pat Thoyts
kroc: Copyright (C) 2004 David Zolli
plastik: Copyright (C) 2004 Pat Thoyts
radiance: Copyright Regents of the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Scriptics Corporation, and other parties
smog: Copyright (C) 2005 Jelco Huijser
winxpblue: Copyright (C) 2004 Pat Thoyts

Reference¶

class ttkthemes.themed_style.ThemedStyle(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶

Bases: ttk.Style, ttkthemes._widget.ThemedWidget

Style that supports setting the theme for a Tk instance. Can be used as a drop-in replacement for normal ttk.Style instances. Supports the themes provided by this package.

__init__(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶

Parameters:	theme – Theme to set up initialization completion. If the theme is not available, fails silently.

theme_names()[source]¶

Alias of get_themes() to allow for a drop-in replacement of the normal ttk.Style instance.

Returns:	Result of get_themes()

theme_use(theme_name=None)[source]¶

Set a new theme to use or return current theme name

Parameters:	theme_name – name of theme to use
Returns:	active theme name

class ttkthemes.themed_tk.ThemedTk(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶

Bases: Tkinter.Tk, ttkthemes._widget.ThemedWidget

Tk child class that supports the themes supplied in this package

A theme can be set upon initialization or during runtime. Can be used as a drop-in replacement for the normal Tk class. Additional options:

Toplevel background color: Hooks into the Toplevel.__init__ function to set a default window background color in the options passed. The hook is not removed after the window is destroyed, which is by design because creating multiple Tk instances should not be done in the first place.
Tk background color: Simply sets the background color of the Tkinter window to the default TFrame background color specified by the theme.

__init__(*args, **kwargs)[source]¶

Parameters:	theme – Theme to set upon initialization. If theme is not available, fails silently. toplevel – Control Toplevel background color option background – Control Tk background color option

set_theme(theme_name, toplevel=False, background=False)[source]¶: Redirect the set_theme call to also set Tk background color

class ttkthemes._widget.ThemedWidget(tk_interpreter, gif_override=False)[source]¶

Bases: object

Provides functions to manipulate themes in order to reduce code duplication in the ThemedTk and ThemedStyle classes.

__init__(tk_interpreter, gif_override=False)[source]¶

Initialize attributes and call _load_themes

Parameters:	tk_interpreter – tk interpreter for tk.Widget that is being initialized as ThemedWidget. Even if this Widget is just a single widget, the changes affect all widgets with the same parent Tk instance. gif_override – Force loading of GIF-themes even if PNG-themes can be loaded

get_themes()[source]¶: Return a list of names of available themes

set_theme(theme_name)[source]¶

Set new theme to use. Uses a direct tk call to allow usage of the themes supplied with this package.

Parameters:	theme_name – name of theme to activate

set_theme_advanced(theme_name, brightness=1.0, saturation=1.0, hue=1.0, preserve_transparency=True, output_dir=None, advanced_name='advanced')[source]¶

Load an advanced theme that is dynamically created

Applies the given modifiers to the images of the theme given and then creates a theme from these new images with the name ‘advanced’ and then applies this theme. Is not available without support for PNG-based themes, then raises RuntimeError.

themes¶: Property alias of get_themes()

Example¶

Using ttkthemes is easiest through the usage of ThemedTk. The following example is written for Python 3.

from tkinter import ttk  # Normal Tkinter.* widgets are not themed!
from ttkthemes import ThemedTk

window = ThemedTk("arc")
ttk.Button(window, text="Quit", command=window.destroy).pack()
window.mainloop()

Themes¶

ttkthemes includes a wide variety of different themes, and there is always room for more themes, no matter how ugly or obscure! Even though some themes may not be used in practice, the original goal of the project has not been forgotten: To gather and preserve all themes.

Aquativo¶

aquativo

An Apple-style like theme by Pat Thoyts, created in 2004. The original site is listed to be http://www.fewt.com, but you will only be able to view this site using the Internet archive’s Wayback machine. It appears the theme is related to the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution _Fuduntu.

Arc¶

arc

The newest theme of the bunch. Being created by Sergei Golovan in 2015 this theme requires Tk 8.6.0 in order to load. This is because the theme uses PNG images with transparency, making for a blue-tinted modern look and feel.

Black¶

black

A simple yet quite popular theme, as it is very consistent in its use of dark colors in all widgets. Created by Mats Bengtsson in 2007.

Blue¶

blue

A theme that does live up to its name. This theme will burn your eyes out being so bright. Everything is blue, though in some widgets there is a nice color gradient. This theme was also created by Pat Thoyts in 2004.

Clearlooks¶

clearlooks

This theme was created by the Tcl/Tk developers team as a demo for what bitmap themes can do. The light tints move toward peach colors, giving this theme a feminine look. It still looks sleek and modern, and wouldn’t be a bad choice. Just as with all themes though, the corners are rounded.

Elegance¶

elegance

A theme that appears to be created by the Tcl/Tk developers team. While attempts to tracing its exact origin have been unsuccessful so far, this theme was probably created around 2008. The theme can be found here, but no author is listed.

Equilux¶

equilux

Originally equilux is a GTK3 theme.

ITFT1¶

itft1

Keramik¶

keramik keramik_alt

These two themes use a single file keramik.tcl and the differences between them are fairly limited. Originally developed by Pat Thoyts in 2004. These themes look the opposite of modern. They are futuristic, but in a bit of a wrong way. Keramic_alt uses a different color scrollbar element, namely silver instead of dark blue.

Kroc¶

kroc

This orange theme by David Zolli is busy on the eyes and has a wood-like grain in the Button widgets. Not a recommended choice for modern UI development.

Plastik¶

plastik

A nice looking theme created by Pat Thoyts in 2005. While not bolstering the most distinctive features, it looks quite modern. Performance suffers heavily though, this is resolved by commenting out line 193 of the plastik.tcl file. The theme changes only slightly because of this change, but native performance is restored.

Radiance (Ubuntu)¶

radiance ubuntu

A theme that was developed by the Tcl/Tk developers team. This theme, as the name suggests, boasts the native look of Ubuntu’s radiance theme, making for a good choice when targeting this platform. Large Progressbar widgets (namely in height) may look a bit mutated, so try sticking to the normal Progressbar height.

Theme ubuntu is equal to radiance, except is uses transparent elements in place of some white areas. Therefore, it looks a bit better when PNG-themes are available.

Smog¶

smog

winxpblue¶

winxpblue

A theme that tries to imitate the Windows XP look and feel created by Pat Thoyts in 2004. Not recommended, even for Windows XP applications.

Theming¶

ttkthemes supports the creation of custom themes based upon static themes during runtime. This is called dynamic theming. The functions to create dynamic themes are implemented in the ThemedWidget class. PNG-based theme support is required to apply a dynamic theme.

Choosing a theme¶

In order to use dynamic theming, you must first choose a theme to base your new theme on. The supported themes for dynamic themes are all pixmap themes that use files (and not a packed archive with files) directly to load pixmaps. An up-to-date list of supported pixmap themes may be found in the pixmap_themes class attribute of any ThemedWidget instance (such as ThemedTk or ThemedStyle). At the time of writing, the following list is available:

pixmap_themes = [
   "arc",
   "blue",
   "clearlooks",
   "elegance",
   "kroc",
   "plastik",
   "radiance",
   "winxpblue"
]

It is recommended to choose a theme with noticeable colors for the best results. radiance and blue have proven to be quite suitable for this purpose. In order to use blue, it is recommended to also modify the background colors of all widgets you plan to use, as the theme colors are not changed during the operations.

Note that while being a pixmap theme, equilux is not included because using dynamic theming with that theme results in severe conversion artifacts.

Modifying a theme¶

In order to load an advanced theme, the following function is provided within any ThemedWidget:

def set_theme_advanced(
    self, theme_name, brightness=1.0, saturation=1.0, hue=1.0,
    preserve_transparency=True, output_dir=None, advanced_name="advanced"
)

As you might be able to deduce from the function definition, various parameters can be used to modify the pixmaps of the theme you choose:

theme_name: The name of a valid pixmap theme to use for modification
brightness: A modifier that is passed on to a PIL.ImageEnhance.Brightness enhancer. Values between 0.0 and 2.0 are expected.
saturation: A modifier that is passed on to a PIL.ImageEnhance.Color enhancer. Values between 0.0 and 2.0 are expected.
hue: A modifier that is used for the ttkthemes._utils.shift_hue function. Shifts the hue of an image by a certain amount. Note that the hue is the hue shift. Values between 0.0 and 2.0 are expected.
preserve_transparency: When set to True, all resulting black pixels will be set to transparent. This is only required when modifying the hue of an image. During the conversion from RGBA to HSV image format, transparency is lost to black pixels, resulting in ugly black patches in images if not reversed.
output_dir: Directory (to which write access is available) in which the new theme files should be placed. By default, a temporary directory is used provided by tempfile. Note that on most systems, this directory is cleared upon reboot.
advanced_name: Name of the theme to generate. You can combine this with an output_dir parameter to actually create a custom theme that you can install on other machines as well. NOTE THAT IT IS REQUIRED TO USE A DIFFERENT NAME EACH TIME IF YOU SET THE ADVANCED THEME FOR A SINGLE TK INTERPRETER INSTANCE MULTIPLE TIMES.

Examples¶

Some examples of what you can create using this function:

radiance

A modified radiance theme. The hue is changed so all originally orange features are a bright green.

arc

A modified arc theme. The hue is changed as well as the brightness, though the latter only very slightly.

Notes¶

Note that the theme is generated during runtime, when the function set_theme_advanced is called. When the function is called, rather resource-expensive operations upon tens of images are performed, as well as disk I/O and loading all images into memory may cause a spike in memory usage, even though it is not all that much on most modern PCs.

Licenses¶

The themes included in the ttkthemes package have been released under various different licenses, including the BSD-2-clause-like Tcl License, GNU GPLv2+ and GNU GPLv3. Note that the only license under which all themes are available together is GNU GPLv3. Most of the code is available under GNU GPLv3 only. If code is available under any other license, it is indicated in the specific files and folders.

Installation¶

The installation of ttkthemes is very simple. There are a few ways to install ttkthemes.

PyPI¶

Installation from PyPI is easiest. Simply use pip to fetch the package and install it:

There is a single installation option available for ttkthemes. In order to use the high-quality PNG-themes instead of the GIF-themes, an extension is required under Python 2 and some earlier distributions of Python 3. Simply install the extension with pip as well.

This option installs the separate package tkimg, for which more information is available from here.

In some cases, it is required to update setuptools in order to install ttkthemes. It is not known which version of setuptools is exactly required at this time.

Source¶

Installation from git is also possible:

python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/RedFantom/ttkthemes

License¶

ttkthemes: A group of themes for the ttk extensions of Tcl

Copyright (C) Regents of the University of California, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Scriptics Corporation, and other parties.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

Please note that while you can use some themes only under GPLv3 and that my code is also available only under GPLv3, some themes, of which the files have a header explicitly stating this, are also available under the BSD-like 2-clause Tcl license.

Recommendations¶

The themes plastik, clearlooks and elegance are recommended to make your UI look nicer on all platforms when using Tkinter and the ttk extensions in Python. When you are targeting Ubuntu, consider using the great radiance theme.