tkinter ttk widgets ignoring background color?

Question

I'm using tkinter's themed (ttk) GUI toolkit for an application. Trying to apply some uniform styling to the widgets in the main window:

s = ttk.Style()
s.configure('.', background='#eeeeee')
s.configure('.', font=('Helvetica', 14))
self.configure(background='#eeeeee')

The font change works great, but for some reason the widgets (i.e. ttk.Label and ttk.Button) don't seem to reflect the background change, which is pretty obvious visually due to contrast between the window's background and the widget's. If I check what it's set to:

label1.cget('background')

it returns '', so clearly it's not being set, but I don't understand what's wrong given the docs for ttk.Label and styles. Trying to set the background for a single label directly:

label1.configure(background='#eeeeee')

also doesn't work (i.e. no change). Any ideas?

Answer 1

I was having this problem as well, and I believe the issue is ttk's "aqua" theme, which is the default on OSX, doesn't respect background colour configuration in a number of widgets. I solved the problem by setting the theme to "default", which immediately caused all widgets' backgrounds to appear as specified.

Here's my basic example:

import tkinter
from tkinter import ttk

root = tkinter.Tk()
style = ttk.Style(root)
style.theme_use('classic')
style.configure('Test.TLabel', background= 'red')
text = ttk.Label(root, text= 'Hello', style= 'Test.TLabel')
text.grid()
root.mainloop()

Try changing style.theme_use('classic') to style.theme_use('aqua') to see the issue.

Answer 2

I had that too, I think it is a ttk bug, is caused by some computers and can't be fixed. Just have a big rectangle using the draw function in the background having the background color. I can't think of anything else, either.