G'day spencoid,

[Disclaimer: I've done a fair amount of work with Tkx; however, I've not touched it in a year or so and don't have any of my code or notes to hand. The following is all from memory and may even be out-of-date: please check details for yourself.]

The first 't' in 'ttk' stands for themed. The default theme is basically whatever your platform provides (either as standard or your own configuration). You can create your own themes for use with Tkx and the 'ttk' version of widgets.

The Tkx documentation (amongst other things) has links to two tutorials which could be of interest to you.

Tkx::Tutorial

If you haven't already read this, you probably should. In particular, look at the Subclassing Tkx::widget section. I recommend you do this. It can be a fair bit of work up front but it's worth it in the end: get rid of that multitude of "Tkx::" namespace prefixes; no longer worry about whether to use "_", "__" or "___" (and don't wear out your underscore key having to type all of them); stop having to decide if a "g_*" or "m_*" method is appropriate; and, of course, write methods for big_red_button() or whatever it is you want. I really do recommend this!

TkDocs - Tk Tutorial

By default, this shows code examples in Perl, Tcl, Ruby and Python: you can filter that to just show Perl. See the Note on Coding Style — I wouldn't recommend cutting and pasting their code verbatim (I seem to recall that, after Subclassing Tkx::widget, and using oher features described in Tkx::Tutorial, I reduced their code by 50% or more). There's information throughout on styling your widgets; however, for the 'ttk' widgets, your main reference would be the Styles and Themes section.