Purpose: Brief intro to Tk

Tk is a Tcl extension, written in C, designed to give the user a relatively high level interface to their windowing environment.
You can find the source code for Tk at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tktoolkit/ .

On a Macintosh, Tk provides some interfaces to the MacOS windowing system.  On Microsoft Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Tk provides some interfaces to the Microsoft windowing system.  On Unix and other platforms where Tk is available, Tk provides some interfaces to the X window system using a Tk specific look and feel, designed to look very similar to Motif, but not using the Motif libraries.


Tk was written by [John Ousterhout], the creator of Tcl.  A PostScript version of the paper introducing Tk to the world can be found at  ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/tkUsenix91.ps .  The PostScript for slides used by Dr. Ousterhout during various USENIX tutorials can be found at ftp://www.tcl.tk/pub/tcl/doc/tut.tar.Z .

Tk allows you to create, manage, and manipulate '''widgets''', rectangular areas on the screen with various features, from which you can build quite powerful GUIs with little effort. Widget classes:
   * button (with text or image): executes a command when clicked
   * label (with text or image): can be updated from a variable
   * text widget: holds text in various fonts, colors, styles; can also hold embedded images and widgets; can wrap and/or be scrolled
   * canvas: holds graphic objects (including text, images, widgets)
   * listbox: holds text lines from which to select
   * scrollbar
   * slider: horizontal or vertical, allows setting a numeric value

For sample images, look at [Widgets in the initial Tk package].
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[LV] anyone have references to some real tutorial information on using Tk?
[An overview of tcl/tk]

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Also of interest might be [Alternate toolkit bindings],
[Common Tk Error Messages and Possible Explanations],
[Alternate widget sets]
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[Tk syntax help] - [Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming]