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Re: Chicken GUI options survey and questions.


From: John Cowan
Subject: Re: Chicken GUI options survey and questions.
Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2021 14:40:03 -0500



On Fri, Mar 5, 2021 at 10:53 AM Matt Welland <matt@kiatoa.com> wrote:
 
 * pstk (probably not really an option, ancient look/feel).

Don't dismiss Tk too fast.  Here are the reasons Larry McVoy of BitMover gives for using it in the GUIs of his company's products:

This question gets raised at least once a year here: why not do native GUIs? It is certainly possible to do so. We have done implementations of several of our GUIs in other toolkits. The arguments for doing so are compelling: better look and feel, native behavior, etc.
 
The reasons for staying with Tcl/Tk are simple:
 
Cost. The cost of creating 2-4 different implementations of each GUI interface is probably 3 times what it took us to get where we are today. But the cost does not end there. The cost extends to testing the GUIs on each platform as well as putting processes in place to make sure that the GUIs march forward in sync, i.e., if the Java revtool gets a new feature, that same feature needs to be added to the Linux, Windows, and Aqua GUIs. When we add up all the costs, it looks more like 6 times the effort.
 
Functionality. Every time we go look at the other toolkits we find that they are not as powerful as the Tk toolkit. In particular, the canvas and text widgets are more useful than any others we have found.

I would add that Tcl/Tk Just Works anywhere you take it with essentially zero customizations, and that there are a lot of themes you can use:  <https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/List+of+ttk+Themes>.

Pros:
 - super easy to learn and use
 - Good range of widgets
 - decent performance

Cons:

 - native widgets can look dated across platforms
 - you are at the whim of the platform.
       (E.g. In my case Gnome broke using bgcolor in
        buttons which I was relying on.)
 - Very difficult to install, still no Ubuntu package.

 

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