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by emilssolmanis 3937 days ago
> [..] on top of tkinter which is one of the most productive graphical toolkits.

> ..

> [..] on top of Tkinter that is such a great graphical toolkit.

Right. About as great as pulling teeth. Not that there's many alternatives, of course...
3 comments
jofer 3937 days ago
Tkinter actually isn't _that_ bad. I've written several fairly large applications with it. You have to re-invent the wheel for several things due to its limited number of "widgets". It used to look very non-native, but that's been largely fixed. Other than that, though, it has a worse reputation than it deserves.

Sure, I'd rather use Qt for something large, but honestly, for a quick-and-dirty gui, it's hard to beat Tk. You can get something reasonably nice looking (at least with recent versions) and reasonably cross-platform very quickly.

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bch 3937 days ago
What sorts of widgets are missing that you are wishing (no pun intended) for.
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jofer 3936 days ago
Yay, puns! :)

The first thing that comes to mind are help tooltips (a.k.a. balloons). There are a few third-party libraries, but none of them that I'm aware of get it quite right (especially for tooltips on menu items).

There are couple of other common widgets as well, but I'm having trouble thinking of them at the moment.

At any rate, there aren't too many (and ttk helps immensely in this regard), but it's something you miss coming from Qt.

On the other hand, being able to put a minimal, but very usable gui together with just a few lines of code is a real strength of Tcl/Tk. (Though I usually use Python+Tkinter as I tend to write scientific applications.) There's a lot to be said for the right level simplicity vs batteries-included.

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metalliqaz 3937 days ago
Yeah, I chuckled a little bit when I read this. I suspect that either the author uses English as a second language, or the author is on the young side and enthusiastic.

Tkinter is not a top GUI toolkit, but I use it all the time because it is built in to Python and requires no libraries. This is very valuable in my job. Thankfully it is fairly well documented and perfectly capable of useful desktop interfaces.

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bechampion 3937 days ago
Tk in 2015! its alive!!
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