I just joined this list, and would like to reopen the subject of migrating some 
of the “old school” tkinter user interface elements to use ttk.

From browsing the list archives, I see this was last substantially discussed in 
2010, and several people over time have done some hacking in this direction, 
though nothing that has ever made it into IDLE. Part of the issue then appeared 
to be contributer/maintainer time constraints… is this still the case now?

I have a good chunk of time to do some work on this, and would be quite 
interested in taking it on, if there’s enough confidence that changes could be 
accepted at this point in time.

To be a bit more specific, the priorities would be: (1) updating the widgets, 
(2) reworking layout/spacing (using grid) to be more consistent with platform 
expectations, (3) replacing homegrown megawidgets like tabbed pages and tree 
widget with ttk built-ins, and (4) minor adjustments to user interface to 
improve usability and/or similarity to other modern programs. For the latter, 
I’m referring to very localized improvements that reflect and respect the 
background and expectations of the target user base, not big changes in 
structure or scope. 

Just as an introduction, I’m the author of the tkdocs.com site, and the 
accompanying ‘Modern Tkinter for Busy Python Programmers’ book (and yes, I 
think a ‘case study’ chapter describing what it took to migrate from old to new 
would be a great addition to the book).

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