eWidgets Toolkit

MGS The eWidgets Toolkit is a collection of extended widgets and dialogs for Tcl/Tk. Each widget/dialog is designed to be self-contained, efficient, lightweight, cross-platform, and to work equally well on large and small displays.

This will form the basis for my other project Mogul.

eWidgets was originally going to be a substantial rewrite of the BWidget toolkit, but I got very bogged down in the complexity of its internal architecture. I also had already written many new widgets, so they have formed the basis of this toolkit.

I would like to hear from anyone who has comments (good and bad) about BWidgets and other mega-widget libraries. In particular, things that don't work, things that are missing, extra functionality, etc. And if you're looking for a new kind of widget that doesn't exist, I might be interested in writing it. I'm always looking for new and better ways of doing things. Please feel free to drop me line at markgsaye @ gmail.com

Q. Where does one find this toolkit? I don't see a URL.

A. One doesn't, yet. I'm still very busy writing it. When I have an architecture which is somewhat stable, with widgets that work (!), some examples, and a smidgin of documentation, I will make an announcement, and upload stuff to http://ewidgets.sourceforge.net/ and http://sourceforge.net/projects/ewidgets/ . I'll try to release individual packages as and when available.

Here's a partial list of widgets, dialogs and libraries that will be included:

Widgets

• button - generic button/checkbutton/radiobutton widget (designed for toolbars)
• calendar - date selector widget (useful with popup widget)
• combobox - combobox widget (uses popup widget)
• drop - collapsible drop-frame widget
• entry::file - file/path-completion for an entry widget
• entry::history - history for an entry widget
• filelist - listbox file browser widget
• filetree - tree file browser widget (using tree widget)
• frame - scrollable frame widget
• mdi - MDI widget
• menubar - menubar widget (using user-definable menu configuration files)
• notebook - notebook widget
• panel - panel widget (like MS Outlook)
• popup - popup widget (e.g. as used by combobox, calendar)
• progress - progress bar widget
• scroll - scrollable-widget widget (with scrollbars that appear only when needed)
• scroller - 2d x/y scrollbar (similar to BWidget's ScrollView)
• slide - slide widget (similar to scale widget)
• spinbox - spinbox widget
• text::listbox - hierarchical listbox widget
• text::map - graphical widget to display text widget search results (adapted from Roy Terry's Hits!)
• titleframe - titleframe widget
• toolbar - toolbar widget (uses grid and clone libraries)
• tooltip - tooltip widget (balloon help)
• tree - canvas-based tree widget
• window - generic window/toplevel widget

Dialogs

• dialog - generic dialog window
• dialog::color - color selector dialog
• dialog::directory - directory selector dialog
• dialog::error - improved bgerror dialog
• dialog::file - file selector dialog
• dialog::fileprop - file properties dialog
• dialog::font - font selector dialog
• dialog::login - a username/password login dialog
• dialog::message - message dialog
• text::find - text find dialog/widget
• text::goto - text goto dialog/widget

Libraries

• canvas - library of canvas widget routines (convert to polygon, reflect, rotate, see, tile)
• clone - library to enable cloning of widgets (including heirarchies), procs (see cloneProc), namespaces, variables, images, etc. Widget tree cloning should be useful for tearoff toolbars (i.e. clone a frame to a toplevel).
• color - library of color routines (see bevel 3d)
• date - library of date conversion routines
• file - library of useful file commands
• focus - library to manage a stack of focus requests
• font - library of font routines
• grab - library to manage a stack of grabbed windows
• grid - library of grid routines (reflecting/inverting/transposing/inserting & deleting columns & rows/etc)
• icon - library of icon routines (finding, refcounting, etc)
• image - library of image routines (sizes, etc)
• interp - library of interp routines (notably the ability to dump the complete state of an interp)
• label - library of label widget routines (wrapping, selection) See [L1 ]
• list - library of useful list commands
• listbox - library of listbox widget routines (move selection up & down)
• source - library to enable debugging/auto/encoding/namespace/etc for 'source'
• string - library of string routines
• text - library of text widget routines (maybe)
• text::sync - library to synchronize two or more text widgets
• window::or - library to handle full-screen windows

Packages

I will put links here to individual packages as and when they become available:

• label - [] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/label/
• listbox - [extended listbox] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/listbox/
• popup - [popup] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/popup/
• text::sync - [text::sync] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/text/sync/
• timer - [timer] - http://www.binarism.com/tcl/timer/
• tooltip - [tooltip] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/tooltip/
• window::or - [window::or] - http://www.binarism.com/tk/window/or/

LV [2003/05/14] Q. How do the entries above such as text, frame, etc. that are currently in Tk differ from the Tk versions?

MGS - At the moment, I'm not sure that the text library will exist. It was intended for a collection of miscellaneous text widget commands, most of which have now been split out into separate libraries/widgets such as text::find, text::goto etc.

The label library contains miscellaneous commands specific to label widgets. For example, see label selection and label wrapping. See also: [L2 ]

The canvas library contains miscellaneous commands specific to canvas widgets. For example: canvas::see, canvas::tile, canvas::convert, canvas::rotate, and more.

The window widget is effectively just a toplevel with some syntactic sugaring to incorporate some extra properties, notably the toplevel-specific options from the wm command. i.e. you could do things like: window .mywin -title "My Window Title" -propagate 0 -transient . . This also means that you can put wm properties into the options database.

The frame widget is a scrollable frame widget, but not using a canvas as most scrollable widgets do. The scrollable area of the widget works more intuitively (I think) than, say, the BWidget's version. Actually, I'm trying to come up with a different name - I didn't want to call it scrollframe or anything like that, but something akin to frame that implies the scrollability. I've only got panel and sheet so far, but I've already got a panel widget (like the Outlook panel) and sheet sounds too like a spreadsheet. Back to the thesaurus, I think.

The listbox library contains miscellaneous commands specific to listbox widgets: moving the selection up/down, deleting the selection, chronological selection, sorting, etc.