Disabling a Tab#

ttk notebook state options

Page1 Notebook with Page2 Disabled#

The tabs have been styled to make the selected tab pale green and the normal tab light green.

There are a couple of options such as forget and hide that remove the tab from view, this may be a little too drastic, even if we restore the hidden tab by using add (forget cannot be restored). Gentler on the user is to disable the tab where the tab is visible but greyed out, within the session it is possible to enable the tab. We can add the tab's state when creating it, later it can be changed back to normal using the tab method.

First of all disable the second tab, we can then enable it by pressing a button tied to an event:

nb1.add(page2, text = 'two', underline=1, padding=2, state='disabled')
.....
enabler = Button(page1, text='Enable Tab two\n Test it out',
    command=lambda : nb.tab(1, state='normal'))
enabler.pack()

Obviously within the logic of the script another event can be used to disable the tab. Notice that in the Button command the tab function uses 1 in the first position which corresponds to the second tab (the first tab would have been 0).

Greying out a tab that is already grey is not so logical, use Style to change the tab colour. First of all configure green.TNotebook.Tab, just using configure the selected tab still is a grey tab, and the normal colour is now light green. Map the disabled and selected states, choose a light green for the selected background and a grey background for the disabled state. When creating the Notebook use the style hook green.Notebook (without .Tab):

st1.configure('green.TNotebook.Tab', background='light green', foreground='blue')
st1.map('green.TNotebook.Tab',background=[('disabled','#d9d9d9'),('selected', '#bceebc')])

nb = Notebook(root, style='green.TNotebook') # <-- only TNotebook, not TNotebook.Tab

Show/Hide Code 03nb_state.py

"""Basic notebook with 3 tabs, binding, disabled state """

from tkinter import Tk, Frame, font
from tkinter.ttk import Notebook, Button, Style

root = Tk()
st1 = Style()
st1.theme_use('default')
st1.configure(
    'green.TNotebook.Tab',
    background='light green',
    foreground='blue')
st1.map('green.TNotebook.Tab', background=[
        ('disabled', '#d9d9d9'), ('selected', '#bceebc')])

test_size = font.Font(family="Times", size=12, weight="bold").measure('Test')
mult = int(test_size / 30)

nb1 = Notebook(root, style='green.TNotebook')
page1 = Frame(root, height=20*mult) # background='red',
page2 = Frame(root, background='yellow', height=20*mult)
page3 = Frame(root, background='alice blue', height=20*mult)
nb1.grid(row=0, column=0)
nb1.add(page1, text='one', underline=0, padding=2)
nb1.add(page2, text='two', underline=1, padding=2, state='disabled')
nb1.add(page3, text='three', underline=2, padding=2)
nb1.enable_traversal()

enabler = Button(page1, text='Enable Tab two\n Test it out',
                 command=lambda: nb1.tab(1, state='normal'))
enabler.pack()

root.mainloop()

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