tkinter menu bar problem

[John Pote]

Thanks for the reply. I now have radio buttons (with a nice tick!) on my 
menu that can be greyed out when disabled. I can also change the background 
colour of the individual buttons as you suggest.

What I cannot do is change the background colour of the menu bar itself. The 
following code is accepted but the menu bar background stays resolutely 
light grey rather than light blue.

 rootWin = Tk()
 menuBar = MenuBar(rootWin, background='light blue')
 menuBar.insert_cascade(MenuBar.CONFIG, label='Config', menu=configMenu, 
background='light blue')

The background options are being ignored and the window retains its standard 
windows colour scheme which I assume is overriding the background colour 
option. I guess my normal windows colour scheme (classic windows!) is not so 
bad and life is too short to tinker with this any more.

Thanks again
John Pote



"Eric Brunel" <eric_brunel at despammed.com> wrote in message 
news:opslxnemnrrqur0o at eb.pragmadev...
> 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 -