1 The Tk Toolkit, Version 2.3
4 University of California at Berkeley
9 This directory contains the sources and documentation for Tk, which
10 is an X11 toolkit that provides the Motif look and feel and is
11 implemented using the Tcl command language.
13 For an introduction to Tcl and Tk you may wish to read two papers:
14 ``Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language'', in the Proceedings of the
15 1990 Winter USENIX Conference, and ``An X11 Toolkit Based on the Tcl
16 Language'', in the Proceedings of the 1991 Winter USENIX Conference.
17 A copy of the first paper is present in Postscript form in the file
18 "tcl/usenix.ps"; Postscript for the second paper is in "doc/usenix.ps".
19 Both Tcl and Tk have evolved quite a bit since these papers were
20 written so the papers are no longer complete or correct, but they will
21 give you an introduction to the systems.
23 The following things are present in this directory and its subdirectories:
25 1. Tk, a toolkit for X11 windowing applications.
26 2. Tcl, an embeddable command language on which Tk is based.
27 3. Wish, a simple windowing shell that uses Tk and Tcl.
28 4. A collection of demonstration scripts to illustrate the use
29 of various features of Tk.
31 The enclosed code is known to run on most versions of SunOS and Ultrix
32 in combination with the X11R4 and X11R5 window servers from MIT. It
33 should also run with few or no changes on H-P and IBM workstations.
35 2. What's New In This Release
36 -----------------------------
38 Tk 2.2 is a major new release with a number of new features relative
39 to the 2.1 release. Here is a summary of some of the most significant
42 - There is now a text widget. It will display multiple lines of text
43 and allows the text to be edited (but the set of bindings for
44 editing isn't very rich yet). It also includes a tagging mechanism
45 that allows you to change the fonts, colors, etc. on a character-
46 by-character basis, and you can associate bindings with tags to
47 implement hypertext-like features. It handles large texts
50 - Canvases have been improved in many ways, including new item types
51 (arcs, bitmaps, and subwindows), Bezier spline support for lines
52 and polygons, "coords" and "bbox" widget commands, and many other
53 improvements and bug fixes.
55 - There is a new "grab" command that can be used to create modal dialog
58 - There is a new "tkwait" command for waiting for particular events to
59 occur (such as modal dialog box to complete its task).
61 - The menu bindings have been completely reworked to have better Motif
62 compliance, such as keyboard traversal.
64 - Individual menu entries can now have their own colors and fonts.
66 - Most widgets (e.g. buttons, entries, text) now have a "-state" option
67 that can be set to "disabled" to make the widget insensitive.
69 - A new "-disabledForeground" option allows you to request that disabled
70 buttons and menu entries be displayed in a dimmer color rather than with
71 a stippled version of the original color.
73 - Entries and messages can now be tied to a variable so that either is
74 updated if the other changes.
76 A good way to try out the new features is to run the "widget" demo;
77 there are a number of new demonstrations to illustrate the new features.
78 This release also contains many bug fixes. For a complete description
79 of the changes in this release, see the file "changes". As far as I
80 know there should not be any compatibility problems with respect to the
86 Manual entries for Tk are in the "doc" subdirectory as a set of files
87 with ".man" extensions. Man pages whose names start with capital letters
88 are for the procedures in Tk's C library. All other man pages document Tcl
89 commands provided by Tk. To print any of the man pages, cd to the "doc"
90 directory and invoke your favorite variant of troff using the normal
91 -man macros, for example
95 where <file> is the name of the man page you'd like to print. If you'd
96 like a complete set of hardcopy manual entries, send me a message with
99 Manual entries for Tcl are available in the subdirectory "tcl/doc";
100 see the README file in the "tcl" directory for more information.
102 Unfortunately, there doesn't yet exist a tutorial-style introduction
103 to the facilities of Tcl and Tk. The papers give a general introduction,
104 but it may be difficult to make the transition from the papers to the
105 manual entries. If you are familiar with the Xt toolkit then the Tk
106 facilities will probably be easy to pick up from the manual entries.
107 If you have no experience with X or Xt, you may wish to wait another
108 6-12 months to use Tk, until a more gentle introduction is available.
113 Before attempting to compile Tk, personalize Makefile by following the
114 directions at the beginning of the file. You should also configure
115 Tcl by following the directions in the file "tcl/README". Then type
116 "make" in the top-level directory (the one that contains this file).
117 This will compile the Tk library and generate a simple windowing shell
118 called "wish". It will also compile the Tcl library, which is in the
121 5. Installing Scripts
122 ---------------------
124 Tk depends on a library of scripts that establish default behaviors
125 for Tk widgets and do many other things. Tk normally expects the
126 scripts to be in /usr/local/lib/tk. Create this directory and copy
127 everything in the "library" subdirectory to it, including both files
128 and subdirectories. Or, if you don't want to create a subdirectory of
129 /usr/local/lib (or if you can't), you can either make a symbolic link
130 from there to the library subdirectory or you can add a "-DTK_LIBRARY"
131 switch to CFLAGS in Makefile; this will allow you to put the script
132 library anywhere you like.
134 I also recommend installing the wish binary in /usr/local. The demo
135 scripts all work best when it is installed there.
140 Once wish is compiled you can use it to play around with the Tk
141 facilities. If you run wish with no arguments, it will open a small
142 window on the screen and read Tcl commands from standard input.
143 Or, you can play with some of the pre-canned scripts in the subdirectory
144 scripts/demos. See the README file in the directory for a description
145 of what's available. The file scripts/demos/widget is a script that
146 you can use to invoke many individual demostrations of Tk's facilities.
148 If you want to start typing Tcl/Tk commands to wish, I'd suggest
149 starting with the "bind" command. Then learn about a widget-creation
150 command like "button", and also learn about the "pack" and "place"
151 commands for geometry management. Note: when you create a widget,
152 it won't appear on the screen until you tell a geometry manager about
153 it. The only geometry managers at present are the packer and the placer.
154 If you don't already know Tcl, read the Tcl paper and the Tcl.man manual
155 entry in the tcl subdirectory.
157 The easiest way to learn about writing new widgets is probably to look
158 at existing widget implementations. The demos directory contains an
159 example of a trivial widget, which you might find useful as a starting
160 point for writing new widgets. You might also take a look at main.c,
161 the main program for wish, to see how to write a main program that uses
162 the facilities of Tk and Tcl.
167 There is a network news group "comp.lang.tcl" intended for the exchange
168 of information about Tcl, Tk, and related applications. Feel free to use
169 this newsgroup both for general information questions and for bug reports.
170 I read the newsgroup and will attempt to fix bugs and problems reported
176 There are still many imperfections with the system. Below is a list
177 of some of the more serious omissions and bugs:
179 1. The widgets don't look very good on monochrome displays right now,
180 because I haven't had a chance to figure out how to do the 3-D
181 effects right without color. The widgets should look pretty good in
182 color. The widgets aren't fully Motif-compliant yet. In particular,
183 there is no keyboard navigation yet. The widgets will eventually
184 become fully Motif-compatible (assuming I can figure out how Motif
185 widgets are supposed to look and feel).
187 2. Tk doesn't work very well with virtual-root window managers such
190 The file ToDo contains a list of various smaller bugs and mis-features
191 that haven't been fixed yet.
196 I'm very interested in getting feedback from you both about bugs and about
197 overall design issues. Send your comments to "ouster@sprite.berkeley.edu".
198 I'll do my best to fix show-stopping bugs quickly, but most other things
199 may not get fast turnaround, since I already have a zillion high-priority
200 things to fix or implement. Before submitting requests for new features
201 you may wish to check the file ToDo, which has a list of things I already
202 know about and plan to implement soon.
207 Tk is still young. I expect it to undergo substantial changes as I learn
208 more about its strengths and weaknesses. Some of the changes will not be
209 backward compatible: at this point I think it's more important to fix
210 problems and improve Tk's structure than to maintain compatibility. At
211 some point in the next year or so there will be a new release with major
212 incompatibilities. My plan is to save up as many as possible of the
213 incompatible changes that are needed and do them all at once.
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