This is an unofficial mirror of Tkinter reference documentation (based on Python 2.7 and Tk 8.5) created by the late John Shipman.
It was last updated in 2013 and is unmaintained. [More info]
Each line in an option file specifies the value of one or more options in one or more applications and has one of these formats:
app
option-pattern
:value
option-pattern
:value
The first form sets options only when the name of the
application matches
; the second form
sets options for all applications.
app
For example, if your application is called xparrot, a line of the form
xparrot*background: LimeGreen
sets all background
options in the
xparrot application to lime
green. (Use the -name
option on the
command line when launching your application to set the
name to 'xparrot'
.)
The
part has this syntax:
option-pattern
{{*|.}name
}...option
That is, each
is a
list of zero or more names, each of which is preceded by
an asterisk or period. The last name in the series is
the name of the option you are setting. Each of the rest
of the names can be either:
option-pattern
the name of a widget class (capitalized), or
the name of an instance (lowercased).
The way the option patterns work is a little complicated. Let's start with a simple example:
*font: times 24
This line says that all font
options
should default to 24-point Times. The *
is called the loose binding
symbol, and means that this option pattern applies to any
font
option anywhere in any application.
Compare this example:
*Listbox.font: lucidatypewriter 14
The period between Listbox
and font
is called the tight
binding symbol, and it means that this rule
applies only to font
options for widgets
in class Listbox
.
As another example, suppose your
xparrot application has
instances of widgets of class Jukebox
. In
order to set up a default background color for all
widgets of that class Jukebox
, you could
put a line in your options file like this:
xparrot*Jukebox*background: PapayaWhip
The loose-binding (*
) symbol between Jukebox
and background
makes this
rule apply to any background
option of
any widget anywhere inside a Jukebox
.
Compare this option line:
xparrot*Jukebox.background: NavajoWhite
This rule will apply to the frame constituting the Jukebox
widget itself, but because of the
tight-binding symbol it will not apply to widgets that
are inside the Jukebox
widget.
In the next section we'll talk about how Tkinter figures out exactly which option value to use if there are multiple resource specification lines that apply.