TKinter in Python - advanced notions

[aapost]

On 6/21/23 09:47, Dan Kolis wrote:
> I've write a huge biotech program ( an IDE for synthetic biology ), and am slowly outgrowing TKINTER.
> 
> Has anybody out there merged a little bit of TCL direct calls from Python 3.X to get more freedom then TKINTER for just some Windows ?

> I wish it looked better, but its 'ok'. I believe X11 IO is considerably superior for serious work the HTML.  I mean 'serious' work. with lots of multi media windows. I am not talking about fb "Oh ! There is a window it opened inthe corner !"... trivial functionality.


I don't know if it would help, but you can extend/add tcl/tk packages

I don't remember the full instructions right off, but quickly reverse 
engineering my old stuff I think you just need to drop them in 
/usr/share/tcltk/ or equivalent.

(I needed to do that to replace the terrible looking default file dialog 
for unix/linux with fsdialog.)

then running something like the following from your Tk object

self.eval('package require fsdialog')

(reverse engineering the python tkinter source you can likely find other 
ways of doing more tcl direct stuff)

I have not researched if there are some better, more featured 
(non-buggy) Text widgets implemented in tcl that can be dropped in, (I 
know several of the tcl drop in widgets I tried were lacking in refinement).

 From what I can tell, once upon a time there were better, more 
interesting projects and tutorials on extending tkinter, such as WCK 
(tkinter3000), but the only remnants of those remain publicly available 
are outdated unmaintained archives.

You might also consider looking at the Grail browser source for research 
purposes, as it does some interesting things with some of the widgets, 
(parsing html and such), even though it is 20 years old now (and written 
in python 1).
The update attempts from 10+ years ago have disappeared. (it's license 
is considered questionable from what I understand, so not sure if that 
is an aspect of it, the other being one of it's main features, python 
applets, is unsafe and was not easily fixable)

You might already be beyond some of these things though.

I know what you mean as far is feeling like the little bit extra you 
need pushes beyond what tkinter can do / makes you feel like you have 
outgrown the module.

(I had to take a break from one of my projects and send it to 
development hell until my UI knowledge/skills improve after I found 
myself considering using xml schema appinfo annotations to store json 
formatted widget specific information, lol.)

I have felt that sense of lack with most of the UI modules I have tried 
though.

I don't know of a clear better python-only solution though that fits my 
personal needs.

So I have to lean toward improving my tcl / C in hopes that it might 
help steer me toward that extra (which seems to be in the spirit of what 
tcl/tk's intent is to begin with). That will be a while for me though if 
I get there.