gitk looks ugly / doesn't honor theme settings

"gitk is implemented in tcl/tk. I've searched around but there doesn't seem to be much you can do; it is scolded as ugly on Linux everywhere. And apart from using a hideous toolkit, gitk has been growing worse for me as they put in more functions (mostly not used) the UI becomes even more confusing.

So I instead of a solution I recommend gitg, which is a similar tool, less mature, using GTK+."

"To fix this the Debian (Ubuntu) way:

$ sudo apt-get install tk8.5
$ sudo update-alternatives --config wish

And then pick the wish8.5 alternative."

"as kaizer.se said gitk (and also git gui) is implemented using tcl/tk, tk is the widget toolkit and do not care about gtk-based themes (or any at all afaik). And no this is not something you can fix (well rewriting gitk to use gtk widget's is ofc not impossible but hardly a 'fix') other than replacing it with something else.

You can change the font's in the preferences to make it slightly better, I use:
Main font: Helvetica 9
Diff display font: Courier 9
User interface font: Helvetica 9

This looks a little better and not as broken as the default's, well for me."

"In my case, the correct version of tk and wish were installed on the system, and the problem arose from having installed anaconda.

The anaconda install script adds export PATH="":/path/to/anaconda3/bin:$PATH"" to your ~/.bashrc, which causes the wish program installed there to take precedence.

Rewriting this line to export PATH=""$PATH:/path/to/anaconda3/bin"" allowed the system's wish to be executed by gitk, and solved the font problem."

"I have built tile-gtk (on Mint 17.2) with following commands:

sudo apt install tcl-dev tk-dev glib2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev
git clone git://git.code.sf.net/p/tktable/tile-gtk tktable-tile-gtk
cd tktable-tile-gtk
./configure --with-glib-lib-inc=$(pkg-config --cflags glib-2.0) --with-gtk-lib-inc=$(pkg-config --cflags gdk-2.0)
make
sudo make install
echo '*TkTheme: tilegtk' | xrdb -merge -

Works good, looks good; unfortunately I can run only one instance of gitk at time due to tilegtk."