Tkinter custom window

Question

I want to make a window in Tk that has a custom titlebar and frame. I have seen many questions on this website dealing with this, but what I\'m looking for is to actually re

Answer 1

You can use the canvas as if it were a frame in order to draw your own window borders. Like you said, however, you cannot draw canvas items on top of widgets embedded in a canvas; widgets always have the highest stacking order. There is no way around that, though it's not clear if you really need to do that or not.

Here's a quick and dirty example to show how to create a window with a gradient for a custom border. To keep the example short I didn't add any code to allow you to move or resize the window. Also, it uses a fixed color for the gradient.

import Tkinter as tk

class GradientFrame(tk.Canvas):
    '''A gradient frame which uses a canvas to draw the background'''
    def __init__(self, parent, borderwidth=1, relief="sunken"):
        tk.Canvas.__init__(self, parent, borderwidth=borderwidth, relief=relief)
        self._color1 = "red"
        self._color2 = "black"
        self.bind("", self._draw_gradient)

    def _draw_gradient(self, event=None):
        '''Draw the gradient'''
        self.delete("gradient")
        width = self.winfo_width()
        height = self.winfo_height()
        limit = width
        (r1,g1,b1) = self.winfo_rgb(self._color1)
        (r2,g2,b2) = self.winfo_rgb(self._color2)
        r_ratio = float(r2-r1) / limit
        g_ratio = float(g2-g1) / limit
        b_ratio = float(b2-b1) / limit

        for i in range(limit):
            nr = int(r1 + (r_ratio * i))
            ng = int(g1 + (g_ratio * i))
            nb = int(b1 + (b_ratio * i))
            color = "#%4.4x%4.4x%4.4x" % (nr,ng,nb)
            self.create_line(i,0,i,height, tags=("gradient",), fill=color)
        self.lower("gradient")

class SampleApp(tk.Tk):
    def __init__(self):
        tk.Tk.__init__(self)
        self.wm_overrideredirect(True)
        gradient_frame = GradientFrame(self)
        gradient_frame.pack(side="top", fill="both", expand=True)
        inner_frame = tk.Frame(gradient_frame)
        inner_frame.pack(side="top", fill="both", expand=True, padx=8, pady=(16,8))

        b1 = tk.Button(inner_frame, text="Close",command=self.destroy)
        t1 = tk.Text(inner_frame, width=40, height=10)
        b1.pack(side="top")
        t1.pack(side="top", fill="both", expand=True)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = SampleApp()
    app.mainloop()