Change color of "tab header" in ttk.Notebook
I had been using Oblivion's answer for some time, but I encountered an issue where the open/save dialog button outlines disappeared and Checkbuttons in Text widgets never appeared to be checked (even when they were checked). So, I translated the theme code into some style configuration and such to solve the problem (it solved it). This will let you change the tab bar color, the tab background/foreground and the active tab background/foreground. Plus, it won't cause issues with the rest of your chosen theme. It's essentially the same code from the theme translated over. So, really, Oblivion deserves most of the credit.
Style().configure("TNotebook", background=myTabBarColor);
Style().map("TNotebook.Tab", background=[("selected", myActiveTabBackgroundColor)], foreground=[("selected", myActiveTabForegroundColor)]);
Style().configure("TNotebook.Tab", background=myTabBackgroundColor, foreground=myTabForegroundColor);
Edit: Apparently, this solution doesn't work in Windows. I tested it in Linux (a number of versions of Xubuntu).
You can try creating a custom theme.
import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk
root = tk.Tk()
mygreen = "#d2ffd2"
myred = "#dd0202"
style = ttk.Style()
style.theme_create( "yummy", parent="alt", settings={
"TNotebook": {"configure": {"tabmargins": [2, 5, 2, 0] } },
"TNotebook.Tab": {
"configure": {"padding": [5, 1], "background": mygreen },
"map": {"background": [("selected", myred)],
"expand": [("selected", [1, 1, 1, 0])] } } } )
style.theme_use("yummy")
note = ttk.Notebook(root)
f1 = ttk.Frame(note, width=300, height=200)
note.add(f1, text = 'First')
f2 = ttk.Frame(note, width=300, height=200)
note.add(f2, text = 'Second')
note.pack(expand=1, fill='both', padx=5, pady=5)
tk.Button(root, text='yummy!').pack(fill='x')
root.mainloop()
EDIT
The most detailed ttk documentation is from the tcl/tk world
eg.
http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl/TkCmd/ttk_notebook.htm
For some useful python-based examples, you can grab the pyttk-samples package from http://code.google.com/p/python-ttk/