This is one of the GSoC 2010 Projects.
Themed Tk on Unix
Ewa Leszczyńska
Jeff Hobbs
Tk Widget Styling Support is a really old topic. First mention I found is http://www.tcl.tk/cgi-bin/tct/tip/48 with date of 23 July 2001, and I want to finish it now. I often have that urge to change the look of applications. But I know that theming is not just to make eye candys. This topic is generally about rewriting the code from Motif-looking widgets to use Qt or GTK instead. That way system layouts can have an effect on Tk programs.
I want to rewrite the code from Motif-looking widgets to use Qt or GTK instead. That way system layouts can have an effect on Tk programs. I am aware of previous attempts to achieve this goal. In the course of the project I will evaluate them and either use them or reimplement the code.
The concept of the solution was evolving through the years. Now Tile-qt is working but incomplete and segfaults on exit. Tile-gtk doesn't work at the moment. I want to spend some time reviewing it and talk to community of users, get mentor advice to get sure that they would be satisfied of that I will do and how.
I always spend some time to give my applications a distinct look and take care of good HCI. I like it how Tk looks under Mac, but I work mostly on Linux last days, so I more often have that feeling to do it another way and use the rich graphic possibilities.
After a lecture of Tcl/Tk Engineering Manual by John K. Ousterhout, and reading a lot of Tcl wiki pages and also scouring many of posts on comp.lang.tcl group and tons of other Internet information sources, I have compiled latest of Tcl and Tk sources and also tile-gtk and tile-qt. There were some problems, mostly in fault of my system deficiencies. The basic difference those extensions bring is already visible in the simplest example: http://asterix.maxnet.org.pl/~aweelka/comparison.png
As you can see, both Qt and GTK based themes look more or less the same as all other applications on my Ubuntu version. The problem seems to be the quality of the code. Configure scripts don't complain about missing libraries. Some people have reported crashes, which I couldn't reproduce on my system. I still have much testing to do, which is bogged down by not having enough RAM (I have to install systems on a physical partition to test on them).
So I have started writing my own extension. I have spent many hours on preparing all files to produce a Tcl extension (I started using an outdated TEA example and had to start from scratch at some point). For now all that it does is detecting whether the system is GNOME or KDE based. The repository is located at: http://hefka.pl:1027/
e-mail address: aweelka[at]gmail.com or jabber/xmpp: aweelka[at]maxnet.org.pl
