beginners choice: wx or tk?

[Ned Deily]

In article <mnsfqm$nvg$1 at dont-email.me>,
 Kevin Walzer <kw at codebykevin.com> wrote:

> On 7/11/15 10:48 AM, Laura Creighton wrote:
> > Unless I was misinformed 2 weeks or so ago when I asked, that is the
> > problem.  Tcl/Tk 8.6 works (and is shipped with) OSX, but tkinter
> > and idle don't work with it.  We will see what Ned Deily says
> > when he gets around to reading this.
> 
> You were misinformed. Tkinter has worked fine with Tk 8.6 for a long 
> time. The issues with Tk on the Mac, owing to Apple's force migration of 
> GUI libraries to Cocoa, have finally been more or less resolved, and Tk 
> 8.6.4 is now quite stable on OS X.

I believe Laura is referring to the Pythons installed by python.org 
installers and it is true that their versions of tkinter and IDLE are 
not linked with 8.6 (but it is not correct that 8.6 is shipped with OS 
X).  As I replied earlier, the issue is not that Tkinter doesn't work 
with Tk 8.6 on OS X: as you say, it does.  The issues are that (1) Apple 
doesn't supply 8.6 with OS X; (2) the Pythons supplied by the python.org 
installers for OS X have traditionally depended on using Apple-supplied 
Tk's shipped with OS X (with an override to ActiveTcl if installed);  
(3) Apple has not updated the version of Tk 8.5 shipped with recent 
releases of OS X, thus still shipping an early version of Cocoa Tk with 
critical bugs that have been fixed upstream by you (Kevin) and others; 
(4) while liberally licensed, ActiveTcl is not free or open source 
software so it is problematic to require all tkinter users to have to 
install it when using python.org Pythons.  The best solution at the 
moment would be for the python.org OS X installers to supply their own 
builds of Tcl/Tk (like the python.org Windows installers do).  That 
hasn't happened yet (we tried one approach a while back but ran into 
problems with some key third-party Python packages expecting files to be 
in particular locations); I hope to try again in the near future.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org