Why is the creation order of widgets important?
The following code works fine. It displays a panedwindow , with a blue box on top and a green box below: panedwindow .root -orient vertical -showhandle true -background red frame .top -background blue -width 100 -height 100 frame .bot -background green -width 100 -height 100 .root add .top .bot pack .root -expand true -fill both However, when I move the panedwindow command down, things stop working. The top, blue box is not shown. Instead, the red of the panedwindow itself shines through: frame .top -background blue -width 100 -height 100 panedwindow .root -orient vertical -showhandle true