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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
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.
emesene seems a clean client
http://emesene.org/screenshots.html
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.
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.
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.




