Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk

Re:Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk by ofalkaed on Monday August 31, 2026 @08:52PM (#49516639)

>you can have Tk (as long as your Cobol allows you to call C).

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.

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Re:Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk by WalterGR on Monday August 31, 2026 @09:26PM (#49516854)

But then you have an entire front end written in Tcl or some other non-COBOL language (to continue the above example,) right?

Or is there a way to run Tk as a daemon?

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Re:Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk by ofalkaed on Monday August 31, 2026 @09:43PM (#49516971)

Believe you have to do that anyways unless you are going to create full language bindings as tkinter and the like do. I don't know the Tk API in full but I don't believe it provides ways to create widgets, just interact with them more directly. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable will fill in the gaps here, I learned what I needed of the Tk API and called it good.

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Re:Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk by em-bee on Monday August 31, 2026 @09:28PM (#49516864)

that sounds interesting. can you give an example please?

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Re:Develop Cross-Platform CLI and GUI Tools with Tcl/Tk by ofalkaed on Monday August 31, 2026 @09:47PM (#49517001)

PureData is a good example.

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