Why are Tk GUI's considered ugly?

Answer 1

The "it's just different" argument is, in fact, the main reason for me. Tk GUIs don't look and behave like a native application, which affects the "look & feel" in multiple small ways, which make a complex app feel weird and clunky compared to native apps on given system.

File dialogs may be a perfect example of what I am writing about: they may not be "worse" or "better" than native dialogs on some system, but they are DIFFERENT, they behave differently to all the rest of applications on the system.

If you're MacOS X user, you may get a feel of it by comparing native Mac apps with apps running on Mac with X11 compatibility layer (like Gimp or Inkscape). They behave differently to all other apps (no menu at top bar, cmd+tab works a bit differently, cmd+backtick works much differently), so - while their behaviour is fine on Linux X11 desktop - the same behaviour feels weird and clunky on Mac.

Downside of Tk is that these GUIs aren't actually native anywhere.

For a portable UI, I may recommend wxWidgets, which are just a common API layer (a facade) for whatever native UI your system provides. It may be a bit offtopic for your current situation, but it may be worth looking at anyway.

Answer 2

It's rather hard to try and be objective about such an issue, this is very subjective at heart I think.

A few points that seem to disturb me:

• Scrollbars everywhere, not just where needed
• Rather "fat" scrollbars, that take up a lot of room
• Plenty of bold-looking fonts, e.g. in the menu titles and so on
• Constant-width ("typewriter style") text in some places

Answer 3

Because its look-n-feel was designed by people who are neither UX nor graphics designers, but programmers. Maybe it solves the problem (having same UI across a number of platforms), but it looks ugly.

Added: Actually, getting UI to the point where it's not considered ugly is an art. I have two extremes in my team. One guy just doesn't care about UI: he sees a button and it's a button no matter how it's drawn on the screen; even if you paint it "pop my eyes" lime green on a bright red background he'll still consider it a button, because it "quacks as a button". The other team member is all about making UI "cool". But he completely misses the point that it's not just shiny look makes Office 2007 "The Office 2007", but it's also icons, consistency across the controls, the way you interact with them -- all these little details that solder look with feel. The result? A lipstick on a pig.

Answer 4

Just one example: if you look at the example you provided, you'll see lots of extra lines - a scrollbar has a few, then the rectangle of the text holder has a few, so on the border you have rather a lot happening.

For a programmer there may be nothing wrong for we see logically, and logically every element just has its own border. But for the rest of people it looks overloaded.

This is a visual design question, not a programming one. This is more like "why iPod is nice and the Zune ugly" kind of thing - you can't get a straight measurable answer, still most people would agree, and that's a fact you need to do something with, if you care about their opinions - i.e., to sell to them.

Answer 5

Seems this discussion ought to at least mention these links:

http://wiki.tcl.tk/8646 http://wiki.tcl.tk/9485