Forest-ttk-theme VS guitk

and for a quick overview of other GUI solutions: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/gui.html (Gtk4, Qt4 and 5, LispWorks' CAPI (incl. for mobile runtimes), IUP…)

I have been pleasantly surprised lately to discover surprisingly nice-looking Tk themes (like https://github.com/rdbende/Forest-ttk-theme). We can use them from CL too, with the nodgui library :) (see link)

For the web, CL & HTMX work well too.

https://github.com/TomSchimansky/CustomTkinter https://github.com/israel-dryer/ttkbootstrap/ https://github.com/TkinterEP/ttkthemes https://github.com/RobertJN64/TKinterModernThemes https://github.com/rdbende/Sun-Valley-ttk-theme https://github.com/rdbende/Azure-ttk-theme https://github.com/rdbende/Forest-ttk-theme

Styling is hard(ish) - compared with CSS, or XAML, it is relatively difficult to style. What seems to work best are using the pre-built themes e.g. forest-dark/forest-light.(https://github.com/rdbende/Forest-ttk-theme) Even with the advent of ttk, there is no common way to style elements. As far as I could tell, this theme e.g. used pngs, there was no way to override individual style elements without actually modifying the underlying style. Ttk styles do help a lot, (I managed a half-way decent pastel-color theme, the issue was with more nitpicky styling management, there are no good defaults), but they are not enough.

It's still in alpha stage but if you're considering tkinter, take a look at GUItk. This is a new declarative framework I'm building around tkinter to make it really easy to create a GUI without every having to think about pack, grid, or place. Layout is accomplished using a declarative syntax with context handlers. Event handlers are created using decorators to easily handle events from a specific widget or events of a specific type. A simple "Hello World" in GUITk: