Tkinter changing the select background color on an unfocused Text widget

Question

I am trying to change the default background color for selected text in a Tkinter Text widget on Mac OS X when the widget does not have focus. The default unfocused select color is gray. After many hours of searching, I was unable to find an out-of-the-box solution to do this. Here is what I have tried:

• Changing the select color with the selectbackground option does not change the select color when the widget is not focused. E.g. It stays gray.
• Nor does Text.tag_configure("sel", background=...)
• Using ttk.Style.map with the "!focus" state works on Entry widgets (and others), but not Text widgets.

So I had to roll my own (see below). Is there a better way to do this?

import Tkinter as tk

# Replace 'tag_out' with 'tag_in'
def replace_tag(widget, tag_out, tag_in):
    ranges = widget.tag_ranges(tag_out)
    widget.tag_remove(tag_out, ranges[0], ranges[1])
    widget.tag_add(tag_in, ranges[0], ranges[1])

def focusin(e):
    replace_tag(e.widget, "sel_focusout", "sel")

def focusout(e):
    replace_tag(e.widget, "sel", "sel_focusout")


root = tk.Tk()

# Create a Text widget with a red selected text background
text = tk.Text(root, selectbackground="red")
text.pack()

# Add some text, and select it
text.insert("1.0", "Hello, world!")
text.tag_add("sel", "1.0", "end")

# Create a new tag to handle changing the background color on selected text
# when the Text widget loses focus
text.tag_configure("sel_focusout", background="green")
replace_tag(text, "sel", "sel_focusout")

# Bind the events to make this magic happen
text.bind("<FocusIn>", focusin)
text.bind("<FocusOut>", focusout)


# Create an Entry widget to easily test the focus behavior
entry = tk.Entry(root)
entry.pack()

entry.insert("0", "Focus me!")

root.mainloop()

Answer 1

Digging through the Tk source code lead me to the answer! The inactiveselectbackground option sets the color.

import Tkinter as tk

root = tk.Tk()

# Create a Text widget with a red selected text background
# And green selected text background when not focused
text = tk.Text(root, selectbackground="red", inactiveselectbackground="green")
text.pack()

# Add some text, and select it
text.insert("1.0", "Hello, world!")
text.tag_add("sel", "1.0", "end")

# Create an Entry widget to easily test the focus behavior
entry = tk.Entry(root)
entry.pack()

entry.insert("0", "Focus me!")

root.mainloop()

Answer 2

You can adjust the priority of the tags using .tag_lower() and .tag_raise()