Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk(cgicoffee.com) |
Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk(cgicoffee.com) |
This is extremely useful for configuration files: they can use some functions you have defined, but may also include arbitrary code. In order to load them, you simply fire up a safe slave interpreter to execute the code and you're done!
Imagine a config file like:
host machine.example.org
port 9000
dbhost server.example.org
set mydomain example.org
set type prod
host machine.$mydomain
dbhost server.$mydomain
if {$type == prod} {
port 9000
} else {
port 9999
}
I'm writing much more Python than Tcl these days, but this is a feature I sorely miss. I keep looking for similar functionality in Python, but I am always disappointed. Starlark has been proposed in the past, but unfortunately it means you have to work with something different than Python (in developing, in deploying, etc.), doubling your dependencies.
No C required, you can just connect to the UI through a socket and often skip the FFI completely. This is my preferred way to use Tk and I don't even consider anything else unless there is a reason. Working this way also has the nice side effect of making the application UI agnostic.
It interfaces to its own internal Tcl interpreter that runs Tk. You can even feed it arbitrary non-Tk commands to eval.
This is a legacy of the trouble Perl/Tk had splitting it out as an independent library which the Tcl devs didn't want to support.
Perl too, IIRC.
I don’t see how the author can write this with a straight face.
The apps look like what native apps looked like in 2003.
you make that sound more like a bug than the feature it truly is
The look is mostly acceptable though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_%28computer_scientist...
My general "daily driver" is python and I love that I can just spin up a cross-platform tool immediately with it. Tcl/Tk rule and are insanely useful.
If you are talking about the size of the TCL/Tk static binaries they are a few MB to judge by the zipkit downloads linked to.
and as the article also mentions what makes the apps cross platform is the native or near-native GUI. and apparently Tk is good for that.
but i'd rather use a nicer language with it. again, the article does talk about python, and points out that the Tk bindings in python are simply not good enough. that was very insightful, and i am glad to know.
however i would like to know if any other languages do better here. what about go for example? has anyone tried Tk with other languages and can share some experience?
It was a Linux system, but all their own software running on it was written in TCL.
I don't think they were using TK though.
Pretty fun to hack around with. Since it was connected to the phone line, when a call came in it could get the caller ID off the line and display it on the TV screen.
https://linux.die.net/man/1/zenity
I have seen scripts that use it for a quick GUI.
I really dislike using Powershell as a shell, but it looks like on Windows specifically it also has some gui thing that is somewhat similar to a .NET like zenity.
It's this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_(Unix_shell) - which turns out is Tcl.
I used it to wrap up some socat and curl. Ugly stuff. Reading values from a serial device, show on screen until a button press when a value was sent over HTTP. The kind of code you hate but the management thinks is production ready.
I found it because someone on Gentoo IRC was like: ?"if you hate yourself try this"?. Would have preferred to do the whole thing in Perl.
The comments are also a helpful reminder of the various sw and visual design/GUI values folks hold.
I personally never gotten past exploring Tkinter but like everything else I played with until I found reason to depend on it, that'll probably change since it's as available as vim and python and _that's_ the kind of thing I value. Limitations/constrains are the engineer's problem, not the tool's (unless they are the tool's problem (but even then, just be your natural creative self and roll with it))
Honestly it feels very outdated compared to the reactive type of GUI's we have today.
Maybe there are some nice wrappers now that help...
I'd give a Rust based version a try. Just compile into a binary for your platform and off you go.
Notwithstanding anything about LLM tools being able to do GUIs any way you want in 2026, I'd really consider just about anything else at this point. JavaFX, React Native, Electron, Flutter, etc.
Do these people use the same template when writing about GUIs? I mean what's complicated about MOC? In CMake it's even transparent and the user doesn't even see it. I swear, the same argument is coming back year after year. "MOC" is complicated, but the compiler itself and ld isn't?
But it's "good enough" like 99% of the time? And going from 0 to "something with a button a user can click" is crazy easy. At my old job, before I started working for myself, I built some painfully sprawling python script to:
1) Spin up a selenium browser to access something in servicenow that they wouldn't let us query the API for but required we access 2) Control the downloading of a bunch of files from a tk interface from python 3) toggle various settings and parse through a bunch of downloaded spreadsheets from there and another website that had some data on 4) python and matplotlib then drew pretty pictures for management 5) python then spit out documents and charts in various formats 6) then a button click triggered it all to process in parallel and opened an email to the appropriate managers that I fire off
This turned something like 10-40 hours of manual work (depending on how well you knew how to do it) where you were clicking and reading into like a 15 min job that I could do on the first of the month while I drank my coffee.
I'm sure it would probably be "better" to write the whole program in Tcl/tk, but sometimes I am lazy. Also, if I'm doing something with pandas or AI and the tk gui is just something slapped over the underlying logic and code. I guess it's a matter of preference? But tkinter is "pretty good" and often "pretty good" is way better than perfect.
They say in the article something like, "if you don't need to call python libraries just use tcl/tk" or whatever. And that's fair, but honestly, being able to throw pandas at something or matplotlib or whatever is super valuable. I think in the future maybe it'll be easy to do something like, "claude please port matplotlib into tcl" and then you can do it natively, that would make sense? Or maybe even like they say it might be cool to make a python script then call it from tcl like they say? but multiple scripts in different languages seems like a bit of a maintenance headache? Though that also might be just a skill issue on my part lol. It might be lazy of me but staying in one language has some advantages, namely, I don't need all the boilerplate argparse code for each thing in python I might want to write.
When I wrote the monstrosity above, I didn't really know anything about tcl/tk other than "isn't that that archaic ui thing?" I actually played around with raw tcl during the process of writing that beast, but that was mostly just for fun.
I guess my real response is, if I end up in a knife fight with a GUI layer over python again, the way they describe in there might be what I do? Calling the python from the tcl might be the optimal choice? It'd be fine to stretch the brain in a slightly different direction anyway.
that sounds a bit worrying. can you give some examples?
from the article i was specifically wondering about this:
And yet still, even with ttk, Python doesn't automatically pick the best theme for the OS! It often defaults to "clam", "alt", or the dreaded "classic" on Linux, which look dated. It's a mess of a Tk bridge! ... the provided bridge to it is clunky
so is it just the perception? sounds like i should just have to remember to pick a better theme. (and use ttk)
and what you say about using pandas supports my point. i usually want to add a gui to something that is written in a particular language for a reason.
Sure you can make this module and there are probably things out there, but you need to wire it up yourself before you even get to the application logic.
Last time I had to make a quick tkinter interface was like a month ago for a project I was working on just for me and I wanted a cleaner interface and I just had codex do it and it was "fine" - like nothing to write home about but "fine." If you're trying to get the most out of your macbook or whatever, the default is kind of bad.
I would say you're correct, it's perception.
> and what you say about using pandas supports my point. i usually want to add a gui to something that is written in a particular language for a reason.
This is exactly why I never even thought to use Tcl to call python before, because you'd end up with something like this for each function you wanted to call in python:
import argparse
from other_library import super_important_function
def do_the_thing():
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument("--data_file", type=str, default="report.dat")
args = parser.parse_args()
super_important_function(args.data_file)
if __name__ == "__main__":
do_the_thing()
import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import filedialog
from other_library import super_important_function
def open_file():
filename = filedialog.askopenfilename()
# now bear with me, I always have to remember if filedialog and the like
# return strings or pathlikes, but you get the picture...
if filename:
super_important_function(filename)
root = tk.Tk()
root.title("Pick a File")
button = tk.Button(root, text="Do super important thing on file!", command=open_file)
button.pack()
root.mainloop()
One of the things I really don't like about big complex tkinter apps (and this may very well be a skill issue on my part) is that in my experience if you're not really careful they tend to end up being monolithic apps with functions and windows bolted on as needed, and the parent/child relationship between windows gets confusing. Again, this is likely just me being dumb at precisely the wrong time, but I kind of think think the python of it is a little bit kind of confusing. I've thought about trying to get good enough at Racket or something similar to build a DSL for generating tkinter python interfaces? But honestly, I haven't really had both the need for something like that or the time. That said, it would be awesome do have something where I could do:
<root layout="grid">
<label row=0, col=1>Hello world</label>
<button row=1, col=1, callback=cool_function>click me!</label>
</root>
Still, wrt the article, I could totally see a situation where it would be better to wire a bunch of other scripts together with Tcl. Imagine your shop has utilities and tools in Go, Python, Bash, whatever. and you needed to wire them all together? That would be an excellent case for doing something like what they described. And like I said, I might try this on the next project where I need a quick GUI.