How to change the foreground or background colour of a Tkinter Button on Mac OS X?

Question

I've been working through the Tkinter chapters in Programming Python and encountered a problem where the foreground and background colours of a button will not change. I am working on a Mac OS X 10.6 system with Python 2.6.1. The colours of a label will change, but not the colours of a button. For example:

from Tkinter import *

Label(None, text='label', fg='green', bg='black').pack()
Button(None, text='button', fg='green', bg='black').pack()

mainloop()

On my Mac system the colours of the label change, but the colours of the button do not. On a Windows system with Python 2.6.1 the colours of both the label and button change.

Anyone know what is going wrong?

I've checked Interface Builder and it appears that there is no option to change the foreground or background colour of a button in that tool. There is the ability to edit the foreground and background colours of a label.

The Mac OS X rendering system (Quartz?) may just not support (easily) changing the fg and bg of a button.

Solution 1

I think the answer is that the buttons on the mac simply don't support changing the background and foreground colors. As you've seen, this isn't unique to Tk.

Solution 2

There is a solution for changing the background of buttons on Mac.

Use:

highlightbackground=color

For example:

submit = Button(root, text="Generate", highlightbackground='#3E4149')

This results in the following, a nice button that fits in with the background:

Solution 3

You can do it with tkmacosx library from PyPI.

Installation:

• For Python 2, use pip install tkmacosx.

• For Python 3, use pip3 install tkmacosx.

---

This is how you use tkmacosx:

from tkinter import *
from tkmacosx import Button

root = Tk()

B1 = Button(root, text='Mac OSX', bg='black',fg='green', borderless=1)
B1.pack()

root.mainloop()

It works fine on Mac OS X.

Solution 4

For anyone else who happens upon this question as I did, the solution is to use the ttk module, which is available by default on OS X 10.7. Unfortunately, setting the background color still doesn't work out of the box, but text color does.

It requires a small change to the code:

Original:

from Tkinter import *

Label(None, text='label', fg='green', bg='black').pack()
Button(None, text='button', fg='green', bg='black').pack()

mainloop()

With ttk:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

root = tk.Tk()

# background="..." doesn't work...
ttk.Style().configure('green/black.TLabel', foreground='green', background='black')
ttk.Style().configure('green/black.TButton', foreground='green', background='black')

label = ttk.Label(root, text='I am a ttk.Label with text!', style='green/black.TLabel')
label.pack()

button = ttk.Button(root, text='Click Me!', style='green/black.TButton')
button.pack()

root.mainloop()

Solution 5

Its quite annoying that after years this is still a problem.

Anyways, as others have mentioned, highlightbackground (the border color) can be used in place of background on a Mac. If you increase the size of the border to be huge (the size of the button or greater), you will get a nice, solid background color. This will give your button the appearance of a label.

This works if you are using place, but not if you are using something like grid. With grid, increasing the border size increases the button size automatically, unfortunately.

However, if you must use grid, you can always hack it....create your colorless grid button. Next use place to parent a background color button on top of it. This will be the button with the 'command' on it or the button you bind events to.

If you want your code to be OS independent, you can either add an 'if OS == "Mac"' statement or even add a custom function that modifies the button if its on a Mac but leaves it alone on Windows or Linux. Here's the former:

from tkinter import *
import platform


if platform.system() == "Darwin":   ### if its a Mac
    B = Button(text="Refersh All Windows", highlightbackground="Yellow", fg="Black", highlightthickness=30)
else:  ### if its Windows or Linux
    B = Button(text="Refresh All Windows", bg="Yellow", fg="Black")

B.place(x=5, y=10, width=140, height=30)

mainloop()

View more solutions

Comments

[ArtOfWarfare]

There is now a better answer - use tkmacosx. Easy to install via pip - requirements look pretty straight forward... as far as I can tell it's all pure python and available on pypi. Credit to Victor VosMottor for mentioning it: stackoverflow.com/a/57127191/901641

[Reblochon Masque]

Wonderful; In fact, the kwarg: highlightbackground works with tkinter OSX

[Russell Smith]

highlightbackground is not the same as background. highlightbackground only affects a small border around the edges of the button. The background of the button itself doesn't change.

[Reblochon Masque]

Yes @BrianOakley, that is what I was saying.

[james-see]

This is the only thing that worked for me to get my app working.

[james-see]

With Mojave, this method works in an environment where white text is the default when the OS is in Dark Mode.

[USERNAME GOES HERE]

P.P.S I think it is the simplest way to do this stuff.

[ZF007]

If you post an answer like this you have to see it in the light that your about 9 years and 9 months too late... so include versioning information and birthdate of tkmacos.

[USERNAME GOES HERE]

It will be useful for other users of stack overflow.

[abhinonymous]

works on 10.15 catalina too, thanks. @anthony-cramp consider changing the accepted answer.

[ArtOfWarfare]

@ZF007 - StackOverflow is forever. It's reference material, not a social network. It's like Wikipedia - how old content doesn't really matter. Nothing ever auto-locks on the basis of age or inactivity. This is the best answer and should be marked as the correct one.

[1QuickQuestion]

perfect, this fixed my issue!

[Alexander B.]

The only problem - if I'm not mistaken it's not cross platform

[Saad]

@AlexanderB.: It is cross-platform, see the GitHub repo

[Sachith Muhandiram]

Please post solution as an answer and then references

[Emi OB]

While this link may answer the question, it is better to include the essential parts of the answer here and provide the link for reference. Link-only answers can become invalid if the linked page changes. - From Review