THAT'S. NOT. COOL.

Hi everyone! I've been trying to use Tcl/Tk for some personal projects recently, but was somewhat put off by the state of the documentation. I find the official site hard to search and navigate, and the layout isn't responsive so trying to read it on my phone isn't easy.

I took a couple of days and put together a new site to make reading the documentation easier. The goal was to make things look modern with a responsive layout, with light and dark mode, and a full search accessible from every page. It's all statically generated, including the search, so hosting costs next to nothing.

The code is all open source as well, with links in the footer. All of the documentation is generated from the man pages, similar to the official site. The generator is written in go with no external dependencies. To be transparent, I did use AI to write a lot of the code.

I mostly created it for myself, but I would love it if it helped anyone here. Let me know if you have any feedback!

https://tcl.lambda.cx/

Tcl/Tk version 9.1 is now available with various updates and fixes. Highlights are listed at https://www.tcl-lang.org/software/tcltk/9.1.html . For details see https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tcl) and https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tk). 🪶

A small, distraction-free multi-document text editor built on Tcl/Tk - https://github.com/KikyTokamuro/mied

Dear TCL community,

I’m happy to share that new Tcl/Tk 9.0 binary downloads are now available at: https://github.com/teclabat/tcltk-binaries

There is already a nice set of Tcl 9.0 packages available like rljson, vectcl, curl, etc. The missing packages will follow as soon as possible.

Happy TCLing!

Tcl/Tk 9.0.3 is now released. This is a patch release of the Tcl programming language and the Tk GUI toolkit with various fixes. For details see the announcements at:
Tcl: https://sourceforge.net/p/tcl/mailman/message/59259102/
Tk: https://sourceforge.net/p/tcl/mailman/message/59259103/

Hey y’all, YouTube randomly suggesting the “Everything is a String” video and TCL looks pretty interesting!

I’m a hobbyist HTML/CSS/JS dev (including Nodejs for server-side stuff) and just wondering how well TCL works as compared to other scripting languages. The idea of TK allowing for platform-native apps sounds amazing, especially now with Electron (🤢) being the standard.

I mainly code Discord bots and web pages to help with TTRPGs that I play, so is not like I work in a big team or anything. I just dabble for fun.

Anyway, I’m babbling and don’t seem to have anything actually productive to say, so I’ll sign off now. ✌️

See details at https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tcl) and https://newsgrouper.org/%[email protected]%3E (Tk).

Python has become increasingly popular in recent years, so we developed an interpreter tclpysh that allows seamless switching between Tcl and Python. After switching, the variables from one language remain accessible in another language, and there’s no memory copy involved (meaning: no matter how large the variable is, the switch happens with zero delay).

Here is an example:

variable longstr [string repeat ab 1000000000]

py; # 0-delay lang switching from tcl to python

len(longstr)

Feel free to try it with our online playground (part of the features are not implemented after porting to web):

https://dashthru.com/playground

It's mildly amusing, watching someone discover Tcl for the first time.

Dear TCL community,

I’m happy to share that new Tcl/Tk binary downloads are now available at: https://codeberg.org/tcltk/binaries

Happy TCLing!

Tcl scripts are usually things designed to be boringly sensible and useful, but the .tclshrc? That's for your interactive sessions, where you can get more creative! So post them! Any tricks in there that are particularly good or that are just plain old nice to work with?

Here's mine:

namespace path tcl::unsupported
proc % args {tailcall {*}$args}
if {
    [package vsatisfies [package require Tcl] 9.0]
    && [dict exists [chan configure stdin] -inputmode]
} then {
    apply {{} {
        const CSI "\x1b\["
        const envname [if {[info commands tk] ne ""} {subst Tcl/Tk} {subst Tcl}]
        puts [format "${CSI}38;5;2;1;3mThis is %s %s, build %.12s\u2026${CSI}0m" \
                $envname \
                [tcl::build-info patchlevel] \
                [tcl::build-info commit]]
        set ::tcl_prompt1 [list apply {{CSI} {
            puts -nonewline "${CSI}38;5;1;1m% ${CSI}0m"
            flush stdout
        }} $CSI]
    }}
}

As part of my work-in-progress Neovim plugin for Tcl development, I added support for Nagelfar syntax checking in the nvim-lint plugin. This provides inline checking for errors as seen in the attached screenshot. If anyone has any ideas on how to create a Tcl Language Server, or knows of a project already working on one, I would be very interested to know about it.

Dear TCL community,

I’m happy to share that new Tcl/Tk binary downloads are now available at: https://github.com/teclabat/tcltk-binaries

This distribution also includes a revitalised scotty/tnm, which I’ve spent some time bringing back into shape, along with many other new packages — take a look for yourself!

Happy TCLing!

Dear Tcl Community: I have created a novel method for building graphical apps (based on the Tk libraries) in which the graphical markup is fully separated from the Tcl logic.

An XML file is used to hold the entire markup for building Forms; this includes all of the annoying little Bind scripts that would otherwise clutter the main logic file.

Every Tk widget is compatible with the system, including the container widgets such as the tabbed notebook and the paned window.

I have written a Substack article about this system which is linked in this post.

Please comment here o in the Substack to make contact if you would like to discuss this further.

Cheers!

John