alt Hacker News>Tcl/Tk to this day is the best tool to make GUI frontends for CLI applications.
Why? Please elaborate. I've heard others say this, but would like to know more.
>Besides that, in the past I used it in production for intranet database entry applications.
GUI apps?
Replies
sprash • today at 12:31 PM
> Why?
CLI applications typically read text from stdin and write text to stdout. The tcl model of "everything is a string" makes exactly the right abstraction to create GUI frontends for CLI applications rapidly and keep them simple at the same time.
> Why? Please elaborate.
Tk's GUI object model is sitting at a reasonable maxima between trivial to make use of vs. triggering the events necessary to make the GUI active.
Small example. You want a button on your GUI that triggers a procedure called "process" when it is clicked, this is the code you need (if you are fine with the remaining defaults) (and assuming you used 'pack' as the geometry manager):
And a fully active GUI button will now appear at the bottom of your Tk window, with a label of "Process Entries" and when you click it, a Tcl procedure named "process" will be executed.