(snappy description of a toplevel belongs here)
The toplevel . is created when Tk is initialized.
[http://www.tclscripting.com/articles/jun06/article2.html%|%Introduction to Toplevels] (link is broken, check [http://web.archive.org/web/20090515132154/www.tclscripting.com/articles/jun06/article2.html%|%archive.org])
DKF notes that, "toplevels on UNIX/X are really a collection of several windows; the window you draw on (which is what winfo id will tell you), another window for a menubar (if you've installed one) and a third one to contain the other two. If you do xwininfo -tree you should be able to find out what's really going on."
LV some users of X and the Metacity window manager have reported frustration when new toplevels fail to be raised. A comment on the Debian tcltk-devel mailing list pointing to [L1 ] indicates that if one adds
wm group $w .
after creating toplevel $w, Metacity will raise the windows as expected. Another comment that appeared in the thread indicated that one needed to "... provide a way to send _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW (and with a correct timestamp!)" when trying to "bring this window to user's attention".
winfo toplevel will tell you the toplevel associated with a given widget. Unfortunately, menus are toplevels too - they can be distinguished in the catch below:
proc is_toplevel {w} { expr {[winfo toplevel $w] eq $w && ![catch {$w cget -menu}]} }
MGS [2003/08/02] - There is no automatic way, so have to do the work yourself. This proc uses winfo children to traverse the widget hierarchy.
proc get_toplevels {{w .}} { set list {} if {[is_toplevel $w]} { lappend list $w } foreach w [winfo children $w] { lappend list {*}[get_toplevels $w] } return $list }
In a more functional programming style (with some helper procs), this might be written:
lfilter {not is_toplevel} [transitive-closure {winfo children} $w]
Q. How can I get widget path of all my toplevel windows ?
MGS [2003/08/02] - There is no automatic way, so have to do the work yourself. Try this proc for starters:
proc toplist {{W .}} { set list {} if { [string equal [winfo toplevel $W] $W] } { lappend list $W } foreach w [winfo children $W] { set list [concat $list [toplist $w]] } return $list }
MGS [2003/08/24] - Of course there's always wm stackorder, but it only returns mapped windows.
MG Aug 30th 2004 - Just destroy it, with
destroy $toplevelWindow
alternatively, as any other Tcl command:
rename $toplevelWindow .
Recently on a mailing list someone asked why, when they created a toplevel, that it did not automatically go away when they clicked on the close button/right click and chose close/etc.
Their code was
wm withdraw . destroy .w set t [toplevel .w] wm title $t "main pgm"
The response provided was they would need to also add something like
wm protocol .w WM_DELETE_WINDOW exit
and the following was suggested as an alternative
wm protocol .w WM_DELETE_WINDOW { if {[tk_messageBox -parent . \ -title "Close?" -icon question \ -type yesno -default no \ -message "Do You want to close this window"] == yes} { exit } }
Note: Any destroy of the main window (aka .) exits the application. There are some other Windows-Events to handle with this, like window size change ...
Peter Hiscocks I was having trouble getting using a topview as an alert. The topview would appear but without content. I discovered that an update command at the end of the alert procedure worked to fill in the toplevel.