Executed in 2010, see GSOC2010:Themed Tk on Unix.
PT Since the introduction of the theming engine into Tk in version 8.5 it is now possible to make Tk applications appear native on Windows and MacOSX. This is achieved by having the graphical elements of the Tk widgets (things like borders, backgrounds or indicators) be drawn using the native drawing functions. For instance on Windows XP and above the Tk vsapi style engine makes calls to the DrawThemeBackground() Windows API when drawing so that it always matches the users current desktop.
Unfortunately on X Windows we still have no real idea what 'native' really means. Maybe the user desktop is using KDE, maybe GNOME. There is no reliable way to find out but we can let the user configure a suitable theme using the *TkTheme XRDB resource. What we require to make Tk applications fit smoothly into X desktops is a ttk style engine that uses Qt or Gtk to do the drawing of the theme elements. In fact we do have an early version of this: tile-qt and tile-gtk originally done by G. Petasis and currently make TEA compatible and hosted in git repositories at SourceForge [L1 ] and [L2 ]. Both of these need work. tile-qt is working but incomplete and segfaults on exit. tile-gtk doesn't work at the moment.
A project to get these themes working properly should suit someone interested in Gtk and/or Qt development with Tk and a strong in GUI usability and design. A benefit of getting these working should yield a significant reduction in the amount of complaining from git users on unix that gitk and git-gui (both Tk applications) are ugly on that platform. Both have already been 'ttk-ified' - they just need suitable theme engines to make them pretty and to fit into the modern unix desktop. Ultimately this should benefit all Tk users, including Python Tkinter and any Perl/Tk users out there too.
hat0 Our very own Joe English wrote in 2006, "testing $KDE_FULL_SESSION and $GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID makes for a reasonable discriminant" for whether or not the user's running a gtk-based or qt-based desktop. quoted from here . So we can make a good guess at what "native" means that covers 95% of *nix users in 2010.