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Tcl/Tk 8.5.0 Released
dkf writes "Tcl/Tk 8.5 has been released for all major platforms after 5 years of development. There are many new goodies in it, including significant speedups through an advanced bytecode engine, stronger localization of applications, integrated arbitrary-precision arithmetic, a whole bunch of brand new skinnable widgets, anti-aliased text support on all platforms, and a new code-module management system to make maintenance of installations a snap. More in-depth information about the features of both this release and Tcl/Tk in general is available at the official Tcl/Tk website. Mark Roseman's blog has a first-look review."
I'm tickled pink!
Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit. This in itself is enough for a new python release. Faster==better, and python always wants to be a bit faster. Tcl/Tk by itself is kind of clunky IMO, but python Tkinter makes good use of it. Thanks Tck/Tk guys!
Clickety Click
Tk has been so in need of a makeover for many years. The widgets in their default state have looked like crusty relics on our grandparents' computers, and even make Windows 3.1 look contemporary. Well done guys. I can't wait to check it out.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
Tk has sort of been the Motiff of the Linux world.
perl6 will be the portable runtime for DNF anyway.
From what I've seen, the internals of the Tcl environment (the interpreter, libraries and so on) are pretty solid and nicely done. Unfortunately the Tcl language itself is peculiar, dated and just not very good. I wish the Tcl people would consider a thorough backward-incompatible revamp of the language into something a bit less off-putting.
Tkinter is the de-facto python windowing kit.
I think Gtk is becoming more and more the "de-facto python windowing kit", in particular as Gtk's cross platform support is improving.
I am only interested in one thing:
Will the Tk widgets now integrate with the rest of the desktop, in terms of using the same theme settings that other programs use?
I like how Tk has been used as a GUI toolkit by many programming lanugages, and I think that says something good about its design and implementation, but the ugly, unthemeable, and out-of-place looking widgets have always been a thorn in my eye.
Especially because it _did_ work sort of right on proprietary OSes as far as I know.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
the Tklet browser plugins again, so that I can write in-browser applications in a sensible programming language. Why Java won that market I can't possibly fathom.
I am trolling
Wow, didn't know that people used it. Now I know what gramps was talking about when he mentioned "programming tickles!"
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Yahbut tcl/tk is used to run machines, factories. The hint is in the name.
Whether the widgets look like Windows, Linux, OSX, Motif or whatever is largely irrelevant as long as the start and stop buttons work when you click them.
Deleted
"Really? For what purpose?"
Bragging.
Anyway, I better get back to writing my Micro Controller Design handbook in Gaelic - I'm sure this one will be a seller, hardly anybody is writing Gaelic computing text books!
M0571y H@rml355.
I think Tkinter still has a lot of advantages at this point over GTK. It has plenty of life left in it. At least until someone writes an equally high-level Python interface to a different graphical toolkit and gets it into the standard library.
If you have a Python application and want to throw a quick GUI onto it, Tkinter is a lot easier. It is also very easy to deploy since it is in the Python standard library. You can write a custom app on your Linux workstation and then the next day put it on a customer's Windows desktop.
Relative to most Python libraries, PyGTK is rather low level, the Python bindings to TK are a lot more Pythonic. For 80% of people, TK is far more useful for adding a quick and dirty GUI onto an application.
Even for someone such as me who uses GNOME-based systems and couldn't care less about how ugly it looks on Windows, GTK is far more powerful and better looking than Tkinter, yes. However, you can't just dip in with Python knowledge and get going, you have to learn rather a lot of low level details about how GTK works. You are far more programming to an implementation rather than to an interface.
So another approach is the WX toolkit. However, I have been looking at a library called Kiwi (
http://www.async.com.br/projects/kiwi/ ) which attempts to provide a more abstracted Python interface to PyGTK. It is still in some ways lower level than Tkinter though.
So I don't see Python changing its default graphical toolkit from TK anytime soon.
P.S. Slashdot does not allow TK >= GTK as the title, perhaps they should re-write the site in Python?
My little Linux and tech blog
The policy is that major version is bumped only when significant backward incompatibility is expected. New features don't do it unless they break old code.
Apparently, some developer are playing with the QT/KDE and GTK theme engine hooks :
Here's a link to tileqt that I found on tcl's page. This theme uses the QT-theme-egine to make TCL/TK applications look like the rest of the KDE desktop. (It works like the gtk2's qt-engine).
Probably there's also someone working on using GTK2's theme engine so Gnome people can have their applications look like their desktop too. But I'm a KDE user and too lazy to search for that information.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Tcl's only redeeming features are Tk, Expect, and the ease with which it can be incorporated as a scripting language for applications. Perl and Python both provide all three along with a richer available library.
[It's been a *very* long time since I reviewed Osterhout's original draft text for Tcl. The minimalist approach to Tcl appealed strongly to the mathematician in me. A few years later, I tried Perl despite the fact that I was appalled by its philosophy of doing what it thinks I mean. However, after many years of practical use, I've come to appreciate Perl and loath Tcl. CPAN makes my life easier just about every month. I'll give Python a try when there I have a reason not to use Perl.]
Apparently Tcl is pronounced 'Tickle'. I learned the hard way after someone had pointed out that I named a file test.tcl.
Tcl is a scripting language.
I will be moderated down for this? Who cares, I have to say it. Why the heck do Tk always looks like total crap on linux? It is the most hideous widgets I have ever seen, the graphic designer should be covered in tar and feathers, and he would still look better than the widgets.
For the rest tcl/tk is still one of the easier ways to develop some cross-platform mini-apps, useful when you don't want to loose time in programming graphic interfaces but you have to for marketing reasons.
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
I think there may be one other speech analysis package that did spectrograms and used TCL/TK at one point, but I don't think it has an active distribution the way WaveSurfer does.
What the WaveSurfer people did is that about half their code base is C-language for implementing speech-specific TK widgets, such as a spectrogram Canvas elaboration of the TK Canvas widget. Their C-language routines call down to low-level X to draw things, and if you build on Windows you need some implementation of X. The WaveSurfer Windows distribution, however, is a single .exe file that has WaveSurfer and whatever support libraries all rolled in, so there is a very simply install.
Their TCL part, however, is a big ball of goo, or at least to someone who doesn't know TCL. Instead of pushing a lot of the functionality into the speech toolkit widgits, they implement a lot of stuff in the TCL layer -- it is not simply a thin scripting layer over a largely C code base. You find that out when you try to customize your own speech app using their speech widgets -- there is tons of functionality that you need to reproduce in your own app as the widgets are pretty bare bones. Not that there is anything wrong with it, but using the WaveSurfer app and hearing about rolling-your-own speech app with their toolkit, you kind of get the wrong impression about how much is in the widgets. I found this out when playing with Python scripting to display their widgets.
The one thing that appeals to me about TK is the Canvas widget, which was apparently inspired by someone's Scheme graphics or some such thing. No worrying about paint messages and invalid regions -- you just give the Canvas a scene graph of line, text, even 3-color bitmap or even overlaying buttons, and the Canvas takes care of all of that. I would like to see such a high-function widget in other environements.
I was never bothered by the non-Windows look to WaveSurfer (OK, the lame Files Open dialog of GTK under Windows bothers me, but not most stuff as Windows is not that uniform a GUI experience to begin with).
Most of the negative comments about Tcl/Tk focus on the past versions, missing the point of this new 8.5.0 release! Try it before you bash it.
...Chuck Norris's law will suit YOU!
Whenever you have one of these overlapping-window GUI front-ends to an OS, developing apps for it is a hard slog, whether it is Windows, GTK, Motif, raw X, whatever. Just like MS came out with their application programmer-friendly Visual Basic as the go-to way of slapping a GUI together, Sun was at one time promoting TCL/TK as the way of slapping a GUI front end on your C program.
In commercial apps, your users worry if your widgets are pretty and Mac people are in a huff about ported software or Java not conforming to UI standard, but for internal apps that just have to get a job done, you often don't care. The projected associated with a high-voltage custom x-ray machine had been a Sun shop since the days Sun 2's came out, and the current app running the x-ray machine is TCL/TK running on a SPARC.
That app makes good use of the Canvas widget to display gray-scale x-ray images and allow you to drag cursors and place measurement markers over those images; apart from that the app is a bunch of buttons to start and stop image collection and motion tracking modes of the x-ray system. I wouldn't have taken note that it was TCL/TK it it were not pointed out, but now that I know, I can see the characteristic widget styles and layouts along with the Canvas that does the x-ray images.
Given that this was all implemented prior to the release of Java, TCL/TK is what you had, and TCL/TK is what you did unless you wanted to take much more time doing the GUI, and our app has aged well (although try hiring someone to change the TCL code), so yes, it is a good question why Sun in effect abandoned that and jumped on the Java bandwagon of their making.
Now if only documentation existed for Ruby Tk...
-S
I'm happy about this new release because I do use one or two programs that use Tcl/Tk and I'd be very happy to see them ... well.. look nicer. Coincidentally, for this very reason I was looking at Tile the other day, which is the skinning engine available for Tcl/Tk. I compiled and installed it.. and.. nothing changed.
So, it seems that Tcl/Tk applications have to explicitly use Tile in order to get the skinning, is this correct? In other words, if I install 8.5, it won't change anything (visually) for the applications I'm already using, until they update themselves properly for 8.5, is that right?
Or is there some flag I can set in some configuration file that will enable the skinning engine?
Just some side information. I read Coccinella will already switch to Tcl/Tk 8.5 in a few months (12 March). See comment at the end of the announcement of the latest release: http://coccinella.im/coccinella-0.96.4 Oh yes, and Coccinella is already using an older version of Tile for Tcl/Tk 8.4. This is some sexy theme proof that Tcl/Tk shouldn't be ugly: http://coccinella.im/stuff/sexy.png
Does anyone know if this will end up making the widgets in perl/tk apps look better/more modern at some point?
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nah. His work was tarred and Gunzipped instead of feathered
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I like Tcl (and Tk). It has a nice syntax. It has good libraries. It runs pretty much the same on any OS I care to use. One of the big benefits as well is the community. It is super helpful and very nice to work with.
Why the heck do Tk always looks like total crap on linux?
Because it was based on the state of the art in 1992 or so.
Who cares?
Because the new widget set is themable and doesn't have to look like total crap.
It's not the way I would have solved the problem, personally, but it does solve it.
"Far from being an outdated or dying language, Tcl today is just a well-kept secret, sitting out in plain sight."
Much like LISP, Smalltalk, Forth, and MUMPS.
Saying PyGtk is less clunky that GObject in C is like saying Stephen Hawking is slightly more intellectually inclined than George W. Bush
P.S. I don't like GObject in C.
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Promoting critical thinking since 1994.