[Idle-dev] IDLE and ttk

[Mark Roseman]

I just joined this list, and would like to reopen the subject of migrating some of the “old school” tkinter user interface elements to use ttk.

From browsing the list archives, I see this was last substantially discussed in 2010, and several people over time have done some hacking in this direction, though nothing that has ever made it into IDLE. Part of the issue then appeared to be contributer/maintainer time constraints… is this still the case now?

I have a good chunk of time to do some work on this, and would be quite interested in taking it on, if there’s enough confidence that changes could be accepted at this point in time.

To be a bit more specific, the priorities would be: (1) updating the widgets, (2) reworking layout/spacing (using grid) to be more consistent with platform expectations, (3) replacing homegrown megawidgets like tabbed pages and tree widget with ttk built-ins, and (4) minor adjustments to user interface to improve usability and/or similarity to other modern programs. For the latter, I’m referring to very localized improvements that reflect and respect the background and expectations of the target user base, not big changes in structure or scope. 

Just as an introduction, I’m the author of the tkdocs.com site, and the accompanying ‘Modern Tkinter for Busy Python Programmers’ book (and yes, I think a ‘case study’ chapter describing what it took to migrate from old to new would be a great addition to the book).