David N. Welton$Revision: 1.4 $

In the spirit of "worse is better", this TIP proposes a simple way to notably improve Tk's look and feel for the 8.5 release of Tk. It does not fix all the problems, and won't make Tk look like whatever toolkit is "native" on the user's machine (Gtk or Qt), but will at least improve the current situation.

This TIP is needed because people continue to complain about Tk's outdated look. This TIP, being extremely easy to implement, should be put into place while we await a technically superior solution such as the Tile project.

The two things that ought to happen are as follows: The code now located in the tklib "style" module should be tweaked to further improve its look (for instance Pat Thoyts suggests a few additional improvements at the bottom of the page), and included as the default look for Tk on Unix in the 8.5 release. Credit goes to Jeremy Collins and the Tk revitalization project for most of the code, I believe.A loadable package should be distributed with Tk that reverts the look and feel to "classic Tk", so that "package require classictk" would be the only change necessary to not use the new look.

This document has been placed in the public domain.