The difference Tile makes

Kevin Walzer notes a before-and-after comparison of Tile vs. Tk widgets on MacOS X. Kevin writes: "[t]he differences are pretty clear: the Tile version picks up the pinstripe background, and also the entry widget looks native (without the outline that one sees in the standard Tk version). . . . I don't personally see a huge difference on Windows when Tile is used there (standard Tk looks pretty much like any other Win2K appp), but it's pretty dramatic on the Mac."

DL But what's with the border going right through the words "Output Format" and "Open New File?"

PT You should try it on Windows XP then. See the various screenshots of the tile demo at http://tktable.sf.net/tile Here for instance, is the normal Luna theme (blue). On the right are normal Tk widgets, the rest are tile widgets.

LV 2009-Sep-25 Today looking at this page, I don't see either image.

└ chrstphrchvz 2018-11-11 Wayback Machine to the rescue! Actually, the site moved at some point, but it's still up (DKF's Tcl site hosted by University of Manchester).

RLH - Yup, it will be a very good day for Tk when Tile is rolled in.

HJG - See Ttk: Tk version 8.5a6 (alpha version 6) already includes Tile in the ttk namespace.

LV These widgets have now been in the distributions for some time.

Customizing Tile Widgets

Tile is a big step forward, but also somewhat of a step to the side at present. It seems as if Tile is designed so that background colours, wrapping (-wraplength), etc are all defined only in styles. But what if the developer wants to make a single button or label or checkbutton look different?

DLR: The current way to do that is creating a new style by means of subclasing a existing style and applying that to the particular widget. However, I think this should be transparent to the user and that all widget options (specially things like bg, etc.) should "just work" like in Tk. Currently what Tile does is ignore them (compatibility options)

WHD: Bear in mind that the current Tk widgets aren't going away; Tcl/Tk 8.5 will include both. So if you want to control everything, you have the option of dropping back to the older widget set.

See Indeterminate Progress Bar with Tile for some tips on building an indeterminate progress bar using Tile.