UI toolkits for Python

[Kenneth McDonald]

This improved appearance has been a nice thing to see, but looks were  
never really the reason I decided to leave Tkinter. It's much more  
the fundamental issues of Tk, plus the fact that Tkinter was never  
really "completed" (not a comment on the original author--there's  
only so much one person can do) that has made me decide to leave Tk  
behind.

As an example of the worst Tk issues (at least for what I was doing):

1) Marks screw up when they come to occupy the position. For example,  
let's say { symbolizes a text mark with right gravity, and } a text  
mark with left gravity. Remember that marks all have names, so they  
can all be referred to uniquely. Now construct some text like this:  
{here} is {some}  marked {text}. Delete all the text. The marks still  
exist. Now, try to recreate the original text by inserting the  
appropriate words at the appropriate marks. It won't work for two  
reasons, the worst of which is that marks that come to occupy the  
same index in the text can actually change their relative order.

2) There are no abstract references; everything is referred to by its  
string name. This causes serious problems with name clashes and code  
abstraction. Tkinter hides some of this, but not enough.

3) Window nesting is completely determined by window naming, which  
only compounds the problem mentioned in (2).

I don't really mean to diss Tk, I just get so frustrated when I think  
of what it could have been...

Thanks,
Ken
On 13-Oct-05, at 4:02 PM, Mark Roseman wrote:

> People should probably be more aware of work that has been going on  
> with
> Tk recently (after a fairly long hiatus) in terms of greatly improving
> its appearance, adding theming, and more.  It's worth checking out,  
> and
> of course, if there's a way to help get some of these changes into
> Tkinter, the Tk folks would I'm sure be helpful.
>
> Here's a portion of a note that Jeff Hobbs posted to the Ruby group
> recently, on a similar topic:
>
>

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