tkinter Listbox loses its selection when clicking elsewhere on the form

Question

When a tkinter form includes a listbox and other widgets, clicking on the other widgets (especially if the mouse is dragged) causes the listbox to lose its selection -- meaning that the element(s) that was/were selected/highlighted in the lisbox become unselected.

I've seen this problem discussed in one or two places on the Net, with this solution proposed: set the listbox exportselection value to False:

lb = Listbox(leftPane, width=24, height=4, selectmode=EXTENDED)
lb.exportselection = False

But that doesn't work at all in my apps. (Tried on Tkinter 8.5 and Tkinter 8.6.1, Python 3.3, Python 3.4... on a variety of Linux distributions. The problem is remarkably constant, regardless of the app in which the listobox is, or the environment in which it's deployed.)

Ideas?

Answer 1

You are doing it wrong. You need to use the config (or configure) method:

lb.configure(exportselection=False)