Tk Source Code

On Windows the text widget hi-lights will disappear when text widget loses focus.  Linux and Mac OS X Tk behaves appropriately.  This bug is generated from a number of bugs for IDLE (Python's IDE) here http://bugs.python.org/issue14146.  On Windows the IDLE debugger no longer hi-lights the current line in the editor.  On Windows the find/replace functions are not functioning properly because found text is not hi-lighted.  The issue was tested using Tk 8.5.13 and Tk 8.6 both exhibit the same problem.  We created a small test program to reproduce this bug with Python 3.x and tkinter:

from tkinter import *

main = Tk()
text = Text(main, width=40, height=10, wrap="char")
text.pack()
text.insert(INSERT, "".join(map(str, range(100))))
text.tag_add(SEL, "1.0", "end")
text.focus_set()

def jump():
    text.after(500, btn.focus_set)
    text.after(1000, text.focus_set)

btn = Button(main, text="Click me", command=jump)
btn.pack()
main.mainloop()

Thanks for your help!

As stated by Mark Roseman below, using -inactiveselectbackground option allows to control the behaviour of the selected text when the text widget does not have focus.

I suggest closure of this ticket with Resolution = Invalid

This can be fixed by using the "inactiveselectbackground" option for text widgets. Not sure if it's correct that this defaults to empty on win32 or not...

I should add the find/replace dialog issue with IDLE is here:
http://bugs.python.org/issue17511