How to change the foreground or background colour of a Tkinter Button on Mac OS X?

There is a solution for changing the background of buttons on Mac.

Use:

highlightbackground=color

For example:

submit = Button(root, text="Generate", highlightbackground='#3E4149')

This results in the following, a nice button that fits in with the background:

I think the answer is that the buttons on the mac simply don't support changing the background and foreground colors. As you've seen, this isn't unique to Tk.

For anyone else who happens upon this question as I did, the solution is to use the ttk module, which is available by default on OS X 10.7. Unfortunately, setting the background color still doesn't work out of the box, but text color does.

It requires a small change to the code:

Original:

from Tkinter import *

Label(None, text='label', fg='green', bg='black').pack()
Button(None, text='button', fg='green', bg='black').pack()

mainloop()

With ttk:

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import ttk

root = tk.Tk()

# background="..." doesn't work...
ttk.Style().configure('green/black.TLabel', foreground='green', background='black')
ttk.Style().configure('green/black.TButton', foreground='green', background='black')

label = ttk.Label(root, text='I am a ttk.Label with text!', style='green/black.TLabel')
label.pack()

button = ttk.Button(root, text='Click Me!', style='green/black.TButton')
button.pack()

root.mainloop()