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Comment by sprash

8 days ago

Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications. Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications. It has since been replaced by Flask. In my opinion the higher complexity of the Flask version is no way justified and we should have kept the much simpler ~2k LOC Tcl/Tk solution.

6 comments

sprash

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jhbadger  8 days ago

In the 1990s, entire GUI applications would be written in Tcl/Tk -- not just the frontend -- the entire thing.

fuzztester  8 days ago

>Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications.

Why? Please elaborate. I've heard others say this, but would like to know more.

>Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications.

GUI apps?

  • sprash  8 days ago

    > Why?

    CLI applications typically read text from stdin and write text to stdout. The tcl model of "everything is a string" makes exactly the right abstraction to create GUI frontends for CLI applications rapidly and keep them simple at the same time.

  • pwg  8 days ago

    > Why? Please elaborate.

    Tk's GUI object model is sitting at a reasonable maxima between trivial to make use of vs. triggering the events necessary to make the GUI active.

    Small example. You want a button on your GUI that triggers a procedure called "process" when it is clicked, this is the code you need (if you are fine with the remaining defaults) (and assuming you used 'pack' as the geometry manager):

        button .process -text "Process Entries" -command process
    pack .process -side top

    And a fully active GUI button will now appear at the bottom of your Tk window, with a label of "Process Entries" and when you click it, a Tcl procedure named "process" will be executed.

WillAdams  8 days ago

What is the best and easiest to install binary distribution?

I was looking into this for v9 and gave up on finding a binary which was:

- easily found

- agreed upon as the one to use

- available for and easy to install on all three platforms

Should I look again?