How to make Menu.add_command() work in tkinter on the Mac?

Question

If I create a tkinter menu on OS X and try to add a menu button to it with add_comand(), nothing shows up in the menu.

If the code below is run on Ubuntu, I get a menubar with two commands labeled "Red" and "Blue" that change the background color of the window.

On OS X 10.10.1 (Yosemite) the buttons do not appear. I know I can make a dropdown menu with the Red and Blue commands, but in my real app, I'd prefer not to do that.

from platform import python_version_tuple

major = python_version_tuple()[0]

if major == '3':
    import tkinter as tk
else:
    import Tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()

fr = tk.Frame(root, height = 200, width = 200)
fr.pack()
menu = tk.Menu(root)
root.configure(menu=menu)
menu.add_command(label='Red', command=lambda:fr.configure(bg='red'))
menu.add_command(label='Blue', command=lambda:fr.configure(bg='blue'))

root.mainloop()

Can you tell me how to do what I want?

Answer 1

I don't think you can do that with the native ("Aqua") Tk on OS X and you probably shouldn't try. OS X native menus don't work like that and Tk tries to follow Apple's Human Interface Guide for menus. You need to have a menu bar with dropdown cascades.

The TkDocs website has a good introduction to Tk menus and their platform differences. (You could use an X11-based Tk on OS X, but that is not recommended as Apple does not ship X11 servers anymore with OS X and your app would look and behave oddly for OS X users.)