See also [What is a megawidget]? ---- [Richard Suchenwirth] - Here is a code snippet for specifying composite fields: a number of different widgets (label, entry) arranged horizontally in a frame, which you might call a "mini-megawidget" (it has no special commands other than those of a frame, but the textvariables do the job...). It simplifies the production of self-explaining GUIs, though the layout, especially field widths, is not optimized yet. Anyway - play with it, make it better! A "fields" is specified like this: fields .1 {"Filter lines with" $FILTER '$NFILTERED} fields .2 {"Field separator" $FS} fields .3 {"Non-empty field" $NEF1 '$N1 = '$NPERCENT1 %} pack .1 .2 .3 -side top The first argument is the widget name, the second contains the "fields" as a list. If a "field" begins with "$", it is rendered as a entry widget bound to the global variable of same name, which thusly can be modified from the GUI. If it begins with "'$", a label with textvariable is created instead, so this is for read-only variables. All other texts are taken verbatim onto a label widget. Note that the dollar sign has a different semantics here (hence, the fields list must be braced to prevent the Tcl parser from doing substitutions): it indicates a global variable of that name. The "tick-dollar" style makes it evident that this isn't just normal Tcl... ;-) proc fields {w contents} { frame $w set n 0 foreach i $contents { if [string match $* $i] { entry $w.$n -textvariable [string range $i 1 end] } elseif [string match '$* $i] { label $w.$n -textvariable [string range $i 2 end] } else { label $w.$n -text $i } incr n } eval pack [winfo children $w] -side left -anchor w } ---- [Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming]