tkinter menu bar problem

[Eric Brunel]

On Wed, 09 Feb 2005 11:35:40 GMT, John Pote <johnpote at blueyonder.co.uk>  
wrote:

> I have a menu bar in a top level window as follows
[snip code]
>
> Q1 Cannot find a way of changing the menu bars background colour. When
> colour options are accepted they seem to be ignored. Is this a native  
> look
> and feel characteristic of write once run anywhere, not yet implemented  
> or
> possibly a bug.

Even if the tk man pages [1] don't mention it, it would not be surprising  
if the background option for menu items did not work on Windows, since  
many things seem to be "hardcoded" on this platform. I tested the  
following code on Linux; it works without problem and has the expected  
behaviour:

>>> from Tkinter import *
>>> root = Tk()
>>> mb = Menu(root)
>>> root.configure(menu=mb)
>>> m = Menu(mb)
>>> mb.add_cascade(label='Menu', menu=m)
>>> m.add_command(label='Quit', command=root.quit, background='red')

If it is what you did and if it doesn't work on Windows, it is likely that  
the background option for menu items is not supported for this platform...

> Q2 Some of the menu options in the config menu will not always be  
> available
> depending on program state. How can individual items in such a menu be
> turned to faint gey to indicate their unavailability. Also a tick mark
> against an item would be useful to show the currently selected option. Is
> this possible?

To "grey out" a menu item:

parentMenu.entryconfigure(itemIndex, state=DISABLED)

To have menu items with a check-mark, use the add_checkbutton or  
add_radiobutton methods on the parent menu. Their use is similar to the  
Checkbutton and Radiobutton classes. See [1] for all available options.

[1] http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.4/TkCmd/menu.htm
  - Eric Brunel -