Hey, the Motif look is dead dead dead! Most modern Unix interfaces look a lot more like Windows these days, and with some option tweaking, so can Tk. Let's make sure we get rid of the need to tweak.

Our approach on Unix is to first alter the default look and feel to more closely match Windows, which is a requirement for commercial-grade application. After that we can move on to supporting themes, Gnome/KDE compliant apps, proper integration with the user's desktop, etc. But the updated default look has to come first.

See the Look and Feel page for overall details, and the Themes page for some of the discussion surrounding that topic.

We won't even be going in to other approaches, such as Tcl bindings to Gtk widgets; this is clearly outside the scope of what we'd like to do here.

Posted at Aug 14/2003 04:03 PM:
DKF: One concern is that people should not end up requiring masses of Xserver extensions to get all their fancy features working. There's a lot of old and crufty platforms out there that are still in serious use. This complicates things a lot, since you have to think about fallback strategies too.

Posted at Mar 11/2004 07:59 AM:
LWV: To what Windows look do you refer? And frankly, the fastest way to lose unix users and developers - who are doing the most of the work on tk - is to force a windows look onto tk.

Posted at Mar 24/2004 03:02 AM:
DKF: FWIW, I think both Gnome and KDE are very Windows-like, especially once you get away from the style of individual widgets and start looking at the overall GUI. I guess this means that there aren't very many innovative GUI desktop designers in the free software community after all. (But then, isn't the very concept of a "Desktop" derivative in itself?)

In any case, getting more like Windows (either the look derived from Win95 or the look derived from WinXP) and less like Motif isn't likely to antagonise very many people. It's extremely likely to be getting more like what they are using now.

Posted at Apr 04/2004 12:25 PM:
Joe English: It should be no surprise that Gnome and KDE seems "Windows-like", since all three platforms are direct descendants of IBM's "Common User Access" specification.

(And if you think there aren't many innovative GUI designers in the free software community, you aren't looking very closely.)