[Tkinter-discuss] problems with Aqua Tcl/Tk core_8_5_branch 2015-04-28

[Russell Owen]

On 5/15/15 6:34 PM, Kevin Walzer wrote:
> Hi Russell,
>
> On 5/15/15 2:38 PM, Russell Owen wrote:
>> I built Tcl/Tk core_8_5_branch from the 2015-04-28 commit (in the git
>> mirror) on OS X 10.9 with MACOS_X_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.6. Visually the
>> results are not as nice as code using the 2015-03-24 commit. It seems
>> that many widgets, including labels and texts, take up far more room
>> than they used to, with the extra room used for unnecessary
>> whitespace. The results is far more different from Unix than it used
>> to be.
>>
>> One improvement is that button text is now displayed with some
>> padding, making them much more readable, and more like unix (in a good
>> way, since it is easier to write cross-platform code; I had been
>> adding padding on OS X). But it seems that too many other controls got
>> the same treatment, even if they didn't need it.
> We've done a lot of work on the metrics for buttons, and I think we are
> pretty much done tweaking them. They are pretty close to the standard
> metrics for the Mac, and I don't want to fiddle with them further.
>
>>
>> Also, both versions of Tcl/Tk have a bug whereby windows are often
>> impossible to close. Clicking the close control and typing cmd-W both
>> do nothing. Fortunately they can still be minimized, but it's
>> disturbing not to be able to close them. Unfortunately this is
>> intermittent, though common, making it hard to present a small
>> example. Has anyone else seen this?
>>
> Marc Culler (the developer of SnapPy) also observed this and did a lot
> of work on patches to Tk to fix the issue. As far as I know the problem
> is licked. Can you run the script below in your version of Wish and see
> if you can reproduce the zombie window issue? (If the issue is present
> the "TopLevel" window will not close when the close button is clicked.)

The window in the test script closed for me. But I still get zombie 
windows in my own application. Unfortunately it is intermittent. Today 
when I tested my own program I saw the problem sometimes and not other 
times.

As to padding: the problem seems to be that the width computation for 
labels is overly generous: they use up far more width than they need, 
making some of my windows 25% or more wider, with lots of unwanted blank 
space. Buttons look great, but why were labels changed? They were fine, 
and looked much better before with versions 2015-03-24 and older.

-- Russell