The canvas widget in the Tk toolkit is a powerful free software tool for creating and manipulating structured graphics.
The Tk Canvas Widget
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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still?
Yes, still a lot of people use it. Tk is one of the, easy to use toolkit available. Infact, I have used it on Windows too. It is also useful to build rapid prototypes with it. Only thing that can be improved is the look of widgets in Tk.
Try building a GUI app with Ruby, Python or Perl. Since the GUI stuff isn’t getting compiled into an executable, the environment in which the app is running has to also have the Windowing toolkit installed.
Granted, this may not be too much of a problem with Linux, but when I wanted to develop a quick GUI app with Ruby for Windows, I had to take it into account, and went with Tk because it’s included with the Ruby installer. I already had to tell anyone who wanted to use it that they had to install Ruby, and that went over fine, but asking them to install anyting else would have been too much.
tk is better than qt & gtk
(‘modern’ tech just suckS!!!)
We use Tcl/Tk to access all the electronics used in our data acquisition measuring the heat capacity of liquid helium. While some other labs use labview (gui app sold by National Instruments, maker of the board which interfaces to the electronics), I decided early on to just write my own
apps.
Tcl is a very flexible and simple language and the integration with Tk is wonderful. There has never been an instance where another tool kit would have been more useful especially with the BLT extension.
Anyone interested in writing their own acquisition software should look into Tcl and Tk. You won’t be disappointed. Feel free to email with any questions.
If only Tk apps would look a little more “modern”… The old Motif look really annoys me a lot.