Version 407 of The Tcler's Wiki

Updated 2013-03-02 02:00:11 by pooryorick

Aloha!! Thanks for visiting the Tcler's Wiki.

This is a collaboratively-edited area on the web, dedicated to the Tcl programming language and its extensions, including the Tk graphical toolkit.

What is Tcl?

Tcl is a simple-to-learn yet very powerful language. Its syntax is described in just a dozen rules, but it has all the features needed to rapidly create useful programs in almost any field of application - on a wide variety of international platforms.

What is Tk?

Tk is a graphical toolkit for Tcl. It allows you to develop graphical applications that run on Windows, Linux, MacOSX and many other platforms.

By collaboratively-edited, we mean that we want you to correct typos, edit code pages to improve code (make certain though that your changes are not breaking the code!), ask questions, add comments, and anything else you can think of! If you have pages that you don't want modified, feel free to host those on your own site and just add URLs here to them.

Is this such a great idea? Of course!

We need you to contribute to the Wiki - to comp.lang.tcl - to any other aspects of Tcl. Please join the adventure!

• Is this your first visit? - then Welcome Visitors.
• This site changes very frequently, so see the recent changes [L1 ] summary.
• Search: Looking for something specific? See the bulleted list right below (introduced to avoid clutter as this was getting slightly comprehensive)
• Have a question about Tcl or Tk? Ask, and it shall be given.

Searching this wiki

• Google can help: See http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Awiki.tcl.tk - just add your search terms after the google search term site:wiki.tcl.tk. You can also use the Wiki's search facility as follows:
• Search for a keyword (kw) in the page titles on this wiki: Add your kw to the end of the URL for this page, Like this: http://wiki.tcl.tk/kw
• Search for kw in the text of each of the pages of this site: As above but append an asterisk. Like this: http://wiki.tcl.tk/kw* An example of searching this web site using the purl address: http://purl.org/tcl/wiki/BOOK .
• Using the wiki's search web interface which is here: http://wiki.tcl.tk/_/search .

Editing Pages And Contributing To This Wiki

The help page contains information on how to get started making changes to the pages on this wiki. Any good-faith changes to this wiki are very welcome! Feel free to jump right in to to correct typos, improve code examples (make sure to verify first that your changes don't break the code), add comments or any other content that contributes to the quality of this site.

Pointers to a few of the many Tcl/Tk discussions and reference material available on this site

Tcl/Tk Basics (Syntax references, Code examples, Help for beginners, etc.):

• Learning Tcl
• What kind of a license does Tcl and Tk use?
• A rich tcl-related table of contents is at Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming
• Code examples according to difficulty: Beginning Tcl, Intermediate Tcl, and Advanced Tcl deal primarily with the base language. Beginning Tk deals with the GUI extension.
• Some code examples and useful goodies are in Bag of Algorithms and Bag of Tk algorithms. See also Tcl examples and Tk examples.
• For basic syntax reference see Tcl syntax and Tk syntax help in this wiki, or the official Tcl/Tk 8.5 Manual at http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/ .
• For a nice printed quick reference guide to Tcl and Tk, see http://www.slac.stanford.edu/%7Eraines/tkref.html for the original and see http://www.bodenstab.org/ for a community member's update to that reference guide.
• A very good syntax reference covering most of the well used extensions is the ActiveTcl documentation at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Products/ASPNTOC-ACTIVETCL_ .
• The Dirty Dozen is a dozen links to Tcl/Tk info.
• There are pages covering a Glossary of terms and an Acronym collection.
• A Tcl Advocacy page is also available.

Applications & Development

• A variety of Tcl community projects are running.
• Bob Techentin set up the Tcl Gems, Advanced Tcl, Example Scripts Everybody Should Have, and the Binary Distributions page.
• Bruce Gingery has started a hierarchy for i18n (Internationalization) issues at the Encoding Translations and i18n page and extensions of supported encodings, and another for Applications in Tcl and Tcl/Tk. See also The Lish family for a set of converters from 7-bit ASCII to Unicodes of most other major writing systems.
• Donal Fellows set up the Tcl Performance, Introspection and Drag and Drop pages.
• Richard Suchenwirth has contributed many useful pages dealing with Unicode, dates, graphics, and more.

Specials (OS specific, particular questions, etc.)

• Information is available for Apple Macintosh and Tcl/Tk
• Microsoft Windows and Tcl (not tk)
• Microsoft Windows and Tk
• Windows COM/DCOM/ActiveX/.NET integration with TclBridge
• Windows Helper Utilities
• Other operating system specific Tcl commands
• The question "Why can I not place unmatched braces in Tcl comments?" is answered here.
• What is the future of Tcl/Tk?
• People often ask about the changes in Tcl/Tk and most recently about changes in tcl/tk 8.5.

People & Community

• A list of Tcl'ers, by name, allows you to find homepages for many who frequent these pages.
• Here is a list of Tcl User Groups.
• Tcl at conferences, workshops, training classes, etc.
• What is Your social contribution as a Tcl'er?
• How can the community help?

Wiki, group dynamics, and tools to support it

• A discussion about the purpose of this Wiki.
• Formatting rules for use when editing pages on this wiki
• Comments on the Tcl'ers Wiki content are welcomed. See Tcler's Wiki in the press for publicity about the web site.
• Help - I am stuck in the Tcl'ers Wiki and I don't know what to do!
• What is this concept of a Wiki Wiki Web, or Wiki in short?
• This implementation is called Wikit, and here's a page about this site.
• The underlying software is stable but you can add your suggestions for Wikit changes.
• See some of the Wiki Gripes, as well as the Wikit problems in this implementation.
• To see diffs between versions of specific pages, visit the page and click on the history link at the bottom (or side) of the page.
• To get an RSS feed of the recent changes: http://wiki.tcl.tk/rss.xml .
• Who owns the content on this Wiki talks about intellectual property issues
• A good spot to see new pages launched is called, eh... New Pages.
• Find categories of pages at Category Category.
• The tcl wiki package project is a community project.
• How to edit Wikit pages with Emacs
• Wikit Problems is the one to contact when this site goes awry...

Links, Chat and other non-wiki places

• Tcl Chatroom - the Tcl development community use a Jabber conference which is bridged to the #tcl channel on the FreeNode IRC network. The TkChat client is a cross-platform GUI client tied to this chat room.
• The usenet newsgroup comp.lang.tcl can be searched from google via http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.tcl (In the olden days, comp.lang.tcl.announce via http://groups.google.com/groups?group=comp.lang.tcl.announce could also be used. However, that group is no longer able to be used) .
• http://www.tcl.tk/ hosts another primary Tcler's resource, with source and binary downloads of Tcl/Tk
• http://www.equi4.com/ hosts, among other important Tcl things, tclkit
• http://tcl.kit/starkits houses a variety of ready-to-run starkits and http://www.equi4.com/tclkit.html hosts tclkits for a variety of platforms.

Tip: http://wiki.tcl.tk/_/recent is a shortcut for the "recent changes" link below.

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