Tkinter or wxpython?

[Chris Mellon]

On 8/8/07, Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:
> Chris Mellon wrote:
> > On 8/8/07, Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:
>
> > Using Tile, of course, loses you the first major benefit of Tk - that
> > it's already included in the standard library. So in this sense it's
> > still "ugly old school look and feel" vs "no external dependencies",
> > which is the swing decision for many people. People who prefer the Tk
> > API, of course, will be happy to use Tile.
>
> Tile has been implemented in the Tk core starting with version 8.5,
> still somewhere between alpha and beta stage. Once 8.5 is out, and
> Python is configured to build against Tk 8.5 (instead of 8.4), it should
> Just Work.
> >
> > Also, while you can get (mostly) native *look*, the feel is absent.
> > Unless I'm very uninformed, Tile is a theming engine only, and doesn't
> > implement platform conventions with regard to behavior (the "feel"
> > part of look and feel).
>
> What do you mean here? Things like keyboard accelerators, menu
> placement, and so on? Those things are already natively implemented by
> Tk, and the developer just needs to invoke them. Sometimes some
> conditional code is required for stuff like keyboard accelerators (the
> "tk windowingsytem" command is useful for this), but again, it should
> Just Work.
>
> Or am I missing something?
>

There's conventions for shortcuts and they vary by platform. For
example, home/end do different things on a mac vs on windows.
Scrollbars interact differently, and menu pulldowns operate
differently. To my knowledge, while Tile can replicate the *look* of
these things, it does not help with the interaction.

People often say "look and feel" when they actually just mean look.
It's something that I try to bring up when I hear "look and feel"
being applied to purely visual skinning tools.

Don't think I'm singling out Tk, Gtk has exactly the same problem -
you can make the buttons look native, but it doesn't adjust the
behavior.