We see spammers active on the Wiki from time to time, but usually their
efforts are quickly erased. That is one of the nice features of the Wiki
and its community :). Another one is that if you run into oddities, like
your chronicler did the other day, where he made a mistake in the
formatting of a code block, you get help in a jiffy. And now on to the
goodies that appear on the Recent Changes page!
'''Bag of tricks'''
We have all been there, I guess, hacking together a small program or a
procedure, just because we can. It is useful for the task at hand and
fun to put together. Sometimes you may just want [Another Way to Implement a Stack]
and let's face it: there is usually more than one way to skin a cat.
If you run out of ideas, or just want a quick answer and not be
bothered, a [Oneliner's Pie in the Sky] may hold that answer ...
While Tcl's adagium is "everything is a string", you may find yourself -
without too much fuss - [Working with binary data] directly.
(Talking of binary data, [\u001a is an end-of-file character
in scripts]. On all platforms for consistency, not just Windows)
And talking of characters besides the ones found on an ASCII-based
keyboard, the [utf-8] encoding used by Tcl is more accessible than you
might think, as witnessed by the cited page.
What about this little gem? The Wiki holds a page on a highly
appreciated utility like [diff in Tcl].
'''Basic commands'''
The manual pages explain what commands like [expr] and [lsort] are all
about. But sometimes that is not enough. For instance the Wiki page on
[lsort] illustrates a number of useful things you can do with it, and
demonstrates why it has a plethora of options.
Likewise, the [expr] command, which has been the subject of discussion
on the Tcl core mailing list, has its own collections of explanations
and demonstrations.
Even more basic than these commands is [\https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/%5B%|%[%|%]
- a syntactical element, not
a command, but surprisingly, you can use it for splitting long text andembbedding comments.
'''A picture tells more ...'''
Interested in high-quality graphical displays? Check out the [Blend2d]
package - it comes pre-built for several operating systems and the demos
are remarkable!
While your chronicler is not much of a gamer, he does enjoy this online
version of the [Gem Game] enabled by the [CloudTk] server.
And [CloudTk] has also been used to make the venerable [Tcl Tutor]
interactive via the Wiki.
Another form of interactivity: check out this effort to bring
Jupyter notebooks to the Tcl world - aptly called [tcljupyter].
Even venerable pages surface from time to time, when someone finds a way
to enhance them. This page from the early years of this century shows
that [A little stopwatch] can be endowed with a dainty new feature.
And what to think of those venerable checkbutton widgets? Use themed
widgets to display them, mix in modern images and you get [Checkbuttons variations]!