Misc. Tutorial Updates.

I've added instructions for compiling Ruby on Mac OS X (thanks Kevin) and on Linux. Also filled in most of the missing Python and Perl code snippets, though there are still a couple left to go. I regenerated all the screenshots too, using fairly recent versions of all three operating systems.

New Install Instructions.

I've done a significant update of the installation instructions which covers the most recent versions of Tk. Mostly this is updates with ActiveTcl, ActivePython and ActivePerl (thank you ActiveState). I've also updated the Ruby on Windows to recommend the excellent RubyInstaller which as of quite recently started bundling Tk 8.5.

On the negative side, I've tried getting Ruby Tk going on both Mac OS X Lion and on Ubuntu 11, and have run into problems that still need to be resolved. Any recommendations for best install practices there would be greatly appreciated.

Btw, there's been other small updates to the site over time, usually in response to this site's many readers who have had questions or noticed errors (and also other a bit larger requests for changes still in the queue). If you do see something that you think should be changed, please let me know about it.

Ttk Visibility and Awareness.

Far from me to ever comment on marketing-related issues, but a recent thread in the Python newsgroup entitled GUIs - A Modest Proposal beckons...

To summarize, this would be the "need a standard GUI to put in the standard library to replace Tk" discussion that happens periodically among the different language communities. You can guess the usual responses: there shouldn't be a standard one, pick mine, no pick mine instead, why not use a web thing, let's start from scratch because it would be better than anything else and fit more in with the language.

I don't begrudge those discussions, as futile as they are. But one thing they always highlight is how few people are truly aware of the newer themed widgets work that has been in Tk for the last several years. While not suggesting that Tk is the best choice for anybody's GUI, it does seem to me that people using this more modern variant for their applications is a step that is small in effort (and hence achievable) with a fairly substantial improvement in resulting quality.

Part of the difficulty is that programs do need to change a bit to see the improvements, so someone running an older app on a new version of Tk will still see the classic widget set and conclude that Tk is still ugly as sin. I'm not suggesting that the decision to separate things out into a new widget set was a bad decision (it wasn't), but it does make the issue of awareness of the new stuff much harder; people need to be explicitly educated, rather than magically discovering it on their own.

Perl people still using Perl/Tk have a bigger step to take (moving to pTk) because the Perl/Tk approach of essentially extracting Tcl from Tk meant they could never practically migrate to modern Tk versions, but for existing pTk users and users of all the other languages, the steps to improve really are small.

I don't have any grand scheme to change this, but when the opportunity presents itself, it's good to make sure that the correct factual information is out there. That is:

Tk has improved greatly by adding a new, but complementary "themed" widget set (ttk) which will make your apps look much, much better. However, this does require some very minor API changes in your application or you won't see the improvements. All the bindings for your language are available to take advantage of ttk, and you can see a site like TkDocs.com to learn how to easily incorporate them into your application.

Tk may not be the right choice, but it would be terribly wasteful for an existing Tk GUI to be tossed simply because nobody knew that it could be very quickly improved using ttk.

PureTkGUI - new GUI builder

I'd like to direct your attention to PureTkGUI, a new Tk GUI builder developed by Thomas Menez. There seems to be quite a lot of functionality in there, and it supports code generation for Tcl, Python, Perl and Ruby.

I'm sure Thomas would welcome any feedback, contributions or encouragement!

Tcl Tk Talk

There's been a few interesting postings floating around the net lately with regard to Tcl and Tk, most notably David Welton's Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong retrospective/analysis. See also reddit.com.

A nice positive note about Tk.

I received this email from a reader of TkDocs:

Thank you for your exciting tutorial about Tk. The set of topics is very well chosen and as far as I can tell you really get the point across. Until now I considered Tk to be a toolkit to rapidly build an ugly looking gui for an unimportant application. For example to visualize server statistics or so on. I am really impressed to see that Tk no longer needs to look ugly. On the contrary it is a very powerfull gui-toolkit which to my mind compares well with others such as e. g. Swing. And as it was designed from the beginning on to be the gui-toolkit of a scripting language it plays well with modern scripting languages. I think it has the right level of abstraction to be suitable to a wide variety of domains. (I hope I have paraphrased your intent correctly.)

Suggestions needed for additional topics.

With the exception of the various 'TODO' items in the tutorial (I'm getting there, really..), it's to the minimal point that I wanted it to get to: a good set of concepts, widgets, and support for all of Tcl, Ruby, Perl and Python.

My question then... what next? I think it would be useful to sketch in the first cut of the "good looking Tk applications" screenshot gallery (suggestions?). The widget roundup, which is essentially a selective quick reference, is another area to consider, but I'm not sure of the value it will provide, so I'd welcome your thoughts on that.

As far as the tutorial, I'd like to extend it to cover additional topics, again fitting in with the "mainstream desktop applications" theme. Some contenders: toolbars, tooltips, drag and drop, printing, tabular data. And I know, not all of those have good answers, or good answers built into core Tk, but I think the topics need to be raised and best practice recommendations made where possible.

What other topics would you suggest? Are there parts of the existing material that you'd like to see developed further? Any feedback you can provide would be a great help, to say nothing of a great motivation!

Tk-Cocoa

For those who don't know, one of the major changes in Tk 8.6 (currently in beta), is that the Mac version has been moved from Apple's older-and-now-deprecated transitional Carbon foundation, to the more native Cocoa libraries used by the vast majority of Mac developers. If you (or your users) work on Macs, this should be a significant improvement.

This work has been done by Daniel Steffen, who deserves our thanks for this. If you're interested, Kevin Walzer has recently posted a series of blog entries about Tk-Cocoa talking about his experiences. I'm sure Daniel and the rest of the Tcl/Tk core team could benefit from additional testing and feedback on this new work, so if you have the opportunity, please try it out on your own code.

Python material in progress.

While not yet complete, I've managed to add a very hefty chunk of Python material to the tutorial. I should be able to complete the rest over the next week or so. Would definitely appreciate feedback from any Pythonistas on the existing material.

While I hadn't used it before, I think Tkinter may very well be the nicest interface to Tk next to Tcl's (for which Tk was originally designed of course, so you'd expect a bit of an advantage). For people unfamiliar with either language, I think Python's more conventional use of parentheses for functions, the "option=value" syntax, plus other language features it takes advantage of are very attractive and win out over Tcl. The two main parts that I think Tcl does in a nicer way are event bindings and the fact you can create and geometry manage a widget in one statement, while still keeping a handle to a widget around.

UPDATE July 17/2009: Most of the rest of the Python examples and code snippets have been added.

ActivePython 3.1 includes Tcl/Tk 8.5

More good news... the just-released Python version 3.1 now includes Guilherme Polo's tkinter.ttk module, which provides access to the themed widgets in 8.5. That is now available as part of ActivePython (make sure to download the 3.1 version, as several different branches of Python are 'current').

I've got it up and running here, and so begins the journey to update this site to include Python support as well. Getting the "big four" Tk-using languages done will be a big milestone.