Version 6 of Tkinspect

Updated 2002-03-27 14:12:25

Purpose: to discuss this Tk introspection tool. The purpose of this tool is the allow one to inspect the contents of variables, arrays, and procs of a running Tk application that permits one to communicate via send (or potentially comm).


Tkinspect [L1 ] has quite a history in the Tcl/Tk environment. Created by Sam Shen, tkinspect provides the ability to examine and modify the procs and variables of any Tcl/Tk application with a working "send" command.

Later, Sam moved on and a few other people have since made modifications. John Robert LoVerso [L2 ] modified tkinspect so that it used comm instead of send. This allowed one to run tkinspect under any operating system which supports sockets.

Paul Healy then wrote a patch so that tkinspect knows about Tcl 8 namespaces [L3 ].

Tako Schotanus wrote a patch for TkInspect so it worked with incr Tcl [L4 ].

Tkinspect is currently in need of an adoptive parent who could integrate the various fixes and modifications into a great tool.


PT writes: I've created a CVS repository with tkinspect-5 and the above patches applied plus a number of other update, enhancements and bug fixes. The application is now being hosted as a module in the SourceForge tkcon project [L5 ] You can checkout the current CVS working files by executing

  cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/tkcon login
  cvs -d:pserver:[email protected]:/cvsroot/tkcon co tkinspect

The current file release (March 2002) is 5.1.6p7 which incorporates support for use under windows (using dde or comm instead of send ), support for incr Tcl 3.2 and a number of bug fixes.

Bug reports, patches and feature requests all to be submitted to the tkcon project tracker please [L6 ]


Category Application