Version 36 of Visual Tcl

Updated 2008-09-28 16:07:16 by Lectus

The name Visual Tcl is, unfortunately, such an obvious one that it has been used by a few things. The most common usage is the Stewart Allen GUI building tool which is listed below.


  • There is an ancient SCO toolkit known as Visual Tcl which had nothing to do with vtcl the graphical building tool.

It was a product/extension which created a Motif GUI interface, as well as an ASCII interface for CUI programs.

Book The Visual TCL Handbook, 1/e

A tutorial covering SCO's Visual Tcl can be found at http://www.computronics.be/courses/vtcl/CONTENTS.html .

This link appears broken as of 19 Apr 2005


  • Visual Tcl/Tk (Douglas A. Bebber)
 What: Visual Tcl/Tk (Bebber)
 Where: http://www.virtualbase.com/vtcl.html
 Description: This is a public project whose goal is to produce and
        make freely available a professional quality cross-platform
        visual design environment for Tcl/Tk.
 Contact: mailto:[email protected] (Douglas A. Bebber)

The link above is dead (2007-08-21). A page in the Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20001213053500/http://www.virtualbase.com/vtcl.html states

"Aug 02, 1999

"The Visual Tcl/Tk project has been terminated! Because of the work of Stewart Allen's project, I see no need to provide a duplication of effort. Stewart's development moved far ahead of my Visual Tcl/Tk project. I simply wanted to see an effective FREE GUI for Tcl/Tk available to the masses to provide momentum for Linux development. In my opinion, Stewart Allen's efforts more than meet that goal. If you want a good FREE GUI development environment for Tcl/Tk please go to Stewart Allen's Visual Tcl site"

An earlier page in the Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/19990422123754/http://www.virtualbase.com/vtcl.html linked to a tarball vtcl0.0.6.tar.gz and a zip file vtcl0.0.6.zip dated May 29, 1997.


  • Visual Tcl (Stewart Allen) is a developer tool for visual development of the GUI portion of one's application.

See http://vtcl.sf.net/ for the application.

See http://sourceforge.net/projects/vtcl/ for download

 What: Visual Tcl/vtcl (Allen)
 Where: http://sourceforge.net/projects/vtcl/
        http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/
        http://www.neuron.com/stewart/vtcl/  -- old link points to sourceforge links
        http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=285
        http://www.deakin.edu.au/%7Emattb/vtcl/
        http://www.jessikat.demon.co.uk/vtcl/
        http://www.ifconnection.de/%7Erjs/vtcl/
        http://www.ultra.net/%7Eeugene/mirror/vtcl/
        http://chaos.uark.edu/vtcl/
        http://www.fis.unb.br/jario/programacao.htm
        http://members.xoom.com/rpragana/tcltk/titulo.html
        http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
        http://www.kitware.com/vtkhtml/vtkdata/VTK_Linux_WWW/VTK-Linux-HOWTO.html
        http://merlin.inescn.pt/%7Equal/vTcl/vtcl-FAQ.html
        http://www.chez.com/fabiencoutant/
 Description: Application development environment written only in Tcl.
        Includes support for compund widgets, custom compund widget
        libraries, aliases, etc.
        Works on Windows, Macintosh and Unix (Tk 4.1 or newer).
        Macintosh version requires you to use Tk 4.2p1 or newer.
        Covered by the GNU general public license.
        Versions are being made available from the WWW page on a regular
        basis.  Sites with tutorials in English, Spanish, and Portuguese are
        listed as the last two sites.
        Currently at v1.6.0.
 Updated: 03/2006
 Contact:
          mailto:[email protected] (Christian Gavin)
          mailto:[email protected] (Damon Courtney)

http://wfr.tcl.tk/223 has links to Visual Tcl tutorials in French.


        vtcl Yahoo group

        This list is for any discussions relevant to the use of or
        development of a graphically oriented Tcl development environment
        currently known as Visual Tcl.

        See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vtcl/ for subscription
        and archive info.

Clif Flynt in the Tcl chatroom on 2003-06-27: "I've reworked some vtcl output. The script performance can be improved a lot by using 'option add' instead of all the -font xx -fg yy options in the widget creations."


This tool was included in O'Reilly's now defunct Mac Open Source Software Directory http://web.archive.org/web/20041013020342/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/d/770

The SCALD project uses Visual Tcl:

 What: SCALD
 Where: http://www.cse.psu.edu/%7Evance/
 Description: School project to create a SPARC assembler interpreter.
        Uses Tcl/Tk and Visual Tcl.
 Updated: 07/1998
 Contact: mailto:[email protected] (Michael K. Vance)

RLH: Is Visual Tcl from http://vtcl.sourceforge.net still being maintained? It is a really nice UI builder.

LV Tthere has been mailing list discussions on the site. But I don't know how much maintaining has been done. But then, if it works properly, there won't be a need for a lot of fixes.


06/08/04 DC - Visual Tcl is not currently being actively maintained as the two developers who were working on it have moved on. Christian Gavin moved on to pursue other interests, and I lost interest in maintaining vTcl in its current form. I have, however, begun work on a rewrite of vTcl that will appear eventually as Tk Designer. I'm renaming and rewriting the code so as to get out from under the GPL license. This may happen a lot quicker if I can get the permission of the copyright holder (Stuart Allen) to change the license to BSD, which is my ultimate goal.

Larry Smith Umm..."renaming and rewriting" will not get you "out from under the GPL". If you started with GPL code, no amount of renaming and rewriting will enable you to change the license. The GPL is viral in the sense that any derived work must also be GPL'd. That's what the GPL is for. Even if the final version ends up with all the code different, the basic structure will still be there and will still be GPL'd.

The only legal way to nullify the GPL is to get the copyright owner to change it for you, or to write an entirely new program from scratch. See [L1 ].


HJG 2005-11-11: It looks like work on vtcl has resumed: http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/?x=news

RLH Well what do you know!


SJPEDRO 2007-08-14: FYI Work is ongoing: http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/?x=news


Roy Keene I have made some vTcl (version 1.6.1a1) starpacks for various platforms, they are available at http://www.rkeene.org/projects/vtcl/ . Feel free to request additional platforms.


[Add info about tricks for using vtcl, benefits, etc.]


Tristan 2008-09-28: Please visit the Visual Tcl Binary Project HomePage: http://code.google.com/p/vtcl-bin/ . This version had more i18n support, and Tile widgets, VU widgets, TkVideo widget, etc.


Lectus 2008-09-28: Tile widgets in Visual Tcl? This is very nice! I wonder if anyone is still developing Visual Tcl? This is really good tool and should not be abandoned.


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