I guess I qualify as a "Tcl'er," having unleashed seven Tcl applications and two megawidgets upon the world: '''[WISH File Rusher]''', a simple twin-column file manager; '''[WISH Supernotepad]''', a fairly simple, fairly powerful text and HTML editor; '''[WISH Binary Viewer]''', a super-simple binary file viewer and (if you insist) editor; '''[WISH Command Center]''', a simple program launcher; '''[WISH CD-Writer]''', a simple front end to "mkisofs," "cdrecord," and "cdrdao" for writing and rewriting CDs; '''[WISH Mini-Console]''', a simple Unix-type command console optimized for Tcl/Tk; '''WISH List''', a fairly simple database/list manager; '''[WISH Color Picker Plus]''', a fairly versatile megawidget for applying user-selected color schemes to Tk applications; '''[WISH User Help]''', the world's simplest hypertext help megawidget (as far as I know, anyway). All but '''WISH List''' (which I've been thoroughly rewriting to take advantage of Tk 8.5 improvements, but I'm not done yet) are available for free download from my web page: http://www.geocities.com/pa_mcclamrock All my programs and megawidgets are distributed under the '''[Maximum License Use for Everyone]''' (MULE, for those who favor silly-sounding, animalistic acronyms)--a little lightweight license I wrote myself to introduce a bit of barely perceptible levity into the lugubrious lore of licensing, while retaining the rudiments of a real open-source software license. I'm not a professional programmer, just a home computer user and hobbyist. I never heard of Tcl until at least the spring of 1999, when I installed Linux on my home computer. (I did that because Windows 3.1 wasn't Y2K compliant and I wasn't interested in "upgrading" to a later version of Windows.) After a fairly slow start, I actually managed to use Linux with some success on my old 486/66 machine with the help of some programs I found on the TUCOWS Linux 4-CD set that came out in midsummer 1999. Three of the most useful ones were written, in whole or in large part, in Tcl/Tk: Henrik Harmsen's [FileRunner] (far superior to the slow, clunky "xfm" file manager that came with Red Hat Linux 5.2); Curtis L. Olson's [CBB] (Check Book Balancer), quicker than Quicken for simple home finances; and Joseph Acosta's [TkNotePad], the least geeky, most familiar-looking and -acting text editor I could find in the bizarre new world of emacs, vi, pico, and their ilk. By the end of 1999, with the help of programs such as these, I had achieved my goal of Windows-less Y2K compliance: I bought a new computer, installed Linux (Mandrake 6.1) as the only operating system, and didn't look back (I'm now running Mandriva 2007 and experimenting with Puppy Linux). Somehow I picked up the idea that Tcl was a lot simpler than the average programming language, and I began to wonder if even ''I'' might be able to write programs in it. I saw ''Tcl/Tk for Real Programmers'' by Clif Flynt on the library shelf, checked it out, and read it. I don't think I derived a lot of benefit from it (probably because I wasn't a real programmer), but it did get me pretty interested in learning how to make widgets do things on a computer, and it convinced me that Tcl/Tk was my best bet for success. (It appeared to be the simplest and most comprehensible language available for writing GUI-based programs, plus it didn't require the programmer to do any time-consuming, loathsome compiling!) What really got me going was ''Graphical Applications in Tcl & Tk'' (2nd edition) by Eric Foster-Johnson. Here was a book (and a CD-ROM) that contained lots of fairly simple scripts that would do things I wanted done, and that explained how and why this and that specific bit of code would do this and that specific thing. Emboldened by this book and by the ''Tcl/Tk Programmer's Reference'' by Christopher Nelson, I started to modify the [TkNotePad] code to get it to do more things, such as to display a "Save Changes?" indicator on the title bar when there was unsaved text in the text widget. After a few failed efforts I succeeded, but I couldn't stop there. I kept thinking of more things I wanted my text editor to do, and trying to find ways to do them: to insert special characters with a single click; to insert whole files into the middle of my text; to display colors and insert hexadecimal codes for them; to insert HTML codes rapidly; to write new Tcl scripts and instantly test-run them. Starting with the code from [TkNotePad] and from Eric Foster-Johnson's "textedit.tcl," and with valuable help from several other Tcl'ers, eventually I developed '''[WISH Supernotepad]''', which can do all these things and more--and I was, within reason, hooked on Tcl/Tk programming as a harmless and even beneficial hobby. After the programs named above, what? Well, in addition to the forthcoming massive revision of '''WISH List''', I've got a few other programs in various states of unfitness for public consumption: '''WISH Checkbook''', a variant of '''WISH List''' for home finance: I actually use this now to keep track of my family's meager finances (instead of GnuCash, which I used to use, or CBB, which I used before that)--but it still has quite a few bugs that need to get squashed when I have time. '''WISH File Puller''', a simple, fairly powerful file-searcher: This works some of the time, and I think I have some idea how to get it to work more of the time. '''WISH Superscriptorium''', a Latin-English translation program based on "Words" by William Whittaker and "Glossator" by Mike Polis: This works pretty well a lot of the time (since Whittaker and Polis already did most of the hard work), but it needs more features and a bit of polishing up on the grammar and vocabulary. '''WISH Music Notepad''', a "music processor" with output in MIDI files, abc text notation, and traditional notation: my most ambitious and least complete effort to date, but at least I can get the virtual keyboard to make notes appear on the staff and sounds emerge from the speakers. David McClamrock Email: mailto:mcclamrock@locl.net Homepage: http://www.geocities.com/pa_mcclamrock/ Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA ---- An anonymous questioner asks: ''Any of your apps run on Windows?'' Answer: '''WISH Supernotepad''' and '''WISH List''' have been reported to work on Windows (except a couple of features of '''WISH Supernotepad''' won't). The two megawidgets and '''WISH Binary Viewer''' should work on Windows without modification, although I haven't tried them. At least one person has modified '''WISH Command Center''' to work on Windows, but it took some doing. The present versions of the other programs will work only on Unix-type systems, so far as I know. I guess it probably wouldn't be too hard to modify them for Windows (at least for someone who knows and cares a bit more about Windows than I do). ----- !!!!!! %| [Category Home Page] | [Category Person] |% !!!!!!