Submitted by You thought Tcl/Tk stands for ‘obsolete GUI’? You define the looks of Tk as ‘prehistoric’? Or do you visualize ugly interfaces when reading this? I certainly do. Mats Bengtsson writes: “Tcl’s windowing toolkit, Tk, has been ‘known’ to be ugly and outdated. With the 8.5 release last December the tile package, now named ttk (Themed Tk), is included in the core which brings true native widgets on Windows (yes, Vista too) and Mac.” But what about Linux? Mats points at tileqt and the new tilegtk and notes: “Imagine that you can switch theme, and toolkits, on the fly without any program restart.” Finally, he mentions progresses in both tkpath and support for WebKit. He concludes: “When all this comes together it will make Tk a very competitive toolkit.”
the only program i know and use that uses tcl/tk is amsn messenger ( an instant messenger that uses msn protocol ) ..anybody else knows any popular app out there that uses tcl/tk? why would anybody use it over other cross platform scripting languages?
gitk uses it too, and i love it
This should give you a good start on “why to use it over other cross-platform scripting languages”.
http://wiki.tcl.tk/590
If that didn’t answer your questions, browse the Wiki. It has a ton of information.
I don’t use Tk very much, but when I had to write some application with Tk (and Python) I found it pretty comfortable. It was very simple to get from nothing to a nice GUI app that works on multiple platforms.
The downside was that it had relatively few widgets, and was not pretty on *nix. Besides that it did not have multi-column lists (I think there are packages for that now).
Edited 2008-08-13 06:41 UTC
Coccinella and Tkabber for example.
Popular… well… I know about TkBrief (Brief means letter in German) is a kind of wrapper that generates LaTeX source from a set of input fields and buttons in order to make use of the dinbrief class so you can write formal correct letter without needing to know anything about LaTeX… but popular? I don’t know, I’m using LaTeX as it is. 🙂
Well, it’s nice and powerful, you can embed it easily into scripts, it doesn’t install tons of dependencies and it’s very handy in order to automate easy jobs – at least that’s what I did use it for (when I don’t see a need to write a C + Gtk program). It’s very lightweight and still powerful.
Yeah, tk/tcl stopped being on my system when Xorg became modular.
I always thought amsn was a great program but ugly as hell. I hope it’s going to change.
amsn has been compilable with tcl/tk 8.5 for quite some time now and looks much better that way.
However, amsn2 is in development now and they’re using the enlightenment tooklit for the ‘official’ gui in v2. That said, I have read about a Qt, GTK and tcl/tk version, too.
emesene seems a clean client
http://emesene.org/screenshots.html
Unfortunately, emesene doesn’t support video chat, among a few more things. It’s a nice client, but it could use a few more features, which I’m pretty sure will come over time. It’s a pretty young oroject.
It is actually the emesene guys who are working with the aMSN people together on aMSN2. I have high hopes for it, but don’t expect the tcl/tk frontend to look anywhere near as smart as the efl/Qt/gtk versions.
Thanks for the info, I wasn’t aware of that.
Give me the functionality of aMSN and the uncluttered emesene GUI and I’m sold
I always thought amsn was a great program but ugly as hell. I hope it’s going to change.
The ugliness is the reason why I stopped using aMSN. Now I only open it if someone insists on using webcam. Otherwise I use Emesene. Oh, and aMSN has always been somewhat buggy and felt rather heavy.
Tloona and TkNotepad are very good. Tkhtmlview is a browser based on scripts. Evolane has a nice game written with Tcl. Amsn is the ONE MSN client (especiall on Windows I uninstalled the msn from …. you know and use tknotepad instead of notepad). A nice distro on Windows (in other words mingw friendly) is WinTclTk but it doesn’t include .a libs or a devel package.
There’s still a reasonable amount of software dotted around, written with Tk, but if they’re hoping to bring it up to date to attract developers to write new applications with it then I think it’s a bit late now.
Oh its never to late. There’s been more then once over the last couple of years where I wanted to throw out a quick program and I would think to myself “why not TCL?” and then I looked at the state of the toolkit and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
I wanted a level of graphics that wouldn’t be embarrassing to show my friends.
Now, apparently, they’ve done it right. go figure.
I think Scilab use Tk for its GUI…
http://wiki.scilab.org/Linking_Scilab_with_Tcl/Tk_8.5
That makes quite a huge product using it.
I have used 3 months ago R to create graphs. The frontend was written in Tcl/Tk. It did the job quickly and clenly.
The only Tk software I use is hgk (like gitk but for mercurial (hg)) and idle (graphical python shell). But those tools I use often. Oh and once I compiled a kernel and I think this configuration tool is tk, too (but I don’t know for sure, it was a long time ago, SuSE 7.0 times). I think it looks ugly, no font antialiasing etc. but the tools I use are very useful for their features, no matter in what toolkit they are written.
I use aMSN but I’ll admit that it’s UI is inconsistent with other apps on Gnome/KDE. While it’ll be nice that Tk will eventually use native widgets, I still don’t see Tk/Tcl reviving much in popularity.
My basic experimentation with Tk in Python leads me to believe that it also isn’t a particularly powerful toolkit, missing many widget elements and events found in other GUI toolkits, such as GTK and QT.
Most of the TK-using stuff I’ve seen over the last 5 years or so as been Python+TK rather than the traditional TCL/TK stack. While these features would be quite good for making TK competitive again, I can’t imagine that happening unless these new features work from Python. TCL is just not widely enough used anymore.