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Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by trebligdivad on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @01:54PM (#49897525)
Tcl/Tk has got to be the easiest GUI system out there; you can get simple stuff going with no effort - nothing I've seen comes close to that simplicity.

Good to see it's getting some modern support.

Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by iamcreasy on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @04:00PM (#49899477)
Is it still true if I want to custom widget with animations?
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by convolvatron on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @04:13PM (#49899681)
I've done animations at the Tcl layer before with composition of Tk objects. for little visualizations its just fine, certainly not AAA
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by agumonkey on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @04:52PM (#49900324)
It hits a sweet spot for a lot of basic UI needs.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by Dwedit on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @07:02PM (#49902006)
What about oldschool Visual Basic?
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by WillAdams on Tuesday September 29, 2026 @10:26PM (#49903648)
It was nice/workable for its time, and one wishes that there was some modern alternative, but "RAD" seems to have dropped off the radar.

Some things I've tried/looked into (beyond TCL/TK):

- Gambas --- Linux only, not sure if there's a nice visual UI builder

- LiveCode --- still salty about the license rug pull, wish the openxtalk folks could get some traction

- MoonBasic --- looks promising, but currently trying....

- flet.dev --- the AI-integration in this makes it quite compelling, though I wish that there was an integrated UI drawing tool, https://github.com/raffieeey/Flet-Visual-Builder is self-described as buggy and hasn't seen an update in 7 months

- Lazarus --- still bummed I never got anywhere with Delphi --- if flet.dev doesn't work out, may try it

Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by pjmlp on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @03:12AM (#49905494)
Besides the sibling comment, VB.NET is still around, even if not with the attention it once had.

VB + C# with Windows Forms is not much different from old school VB.

And for the pixel positioning complaints, it is about time people learn about FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel, they exist since .NET 2.0 (2005).

Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by bitwize on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @09:04AM (#49908381)
That's new-school VB. Tcl was doing automatic widget layout back when VB was using absolute "dialog units" for everything.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by pjmlp on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @10:40AM (#49909661)
To be more pedantic that was taken from Motif layout managers, and old school VB did have layout managers available, however a large majority only dragged and dropped from the toolbox.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by bitwize on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @09:10AM (#49908443)
Too much rat wrestling. You could bang out a few lines of Tcl in your editor and have a working GUI. Even stub out the commands that widgets run, tweak and reload until it behaves right, then add those back for a working program. Absolutely nice for providing a visual interface for your Unix scripts or programs, or for building whole applications in if you're daring.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by dkfellows on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @06:36AM (#49906945)
The current main project for Tk, targeting the 9.2 release next year, is porting to work on Wayland. (But not dropping support for X11, Windows or macOS.) Apparently, the widget demo is now working (i.e., you could probably build some applications on it) but advanced features like accessibility support are still in progress.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by trebligdivad on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @08:59AM (#49908307)
Hey Donal, long time! Great to see you still involved.
Re:Tcl/Tk 9.1 Released by BoingBoomTschak on Wednesday September 30, 2026 @01:10PM (#49911670)
Didn't expect Wayland support that soon!