Chris Mellon wrote: >> What do you mean here? Things like keyboard accelerators, menu >> placement, and so on? Those things are already natively implemented by >> Tk, and the developer just needs to invoke them. Sometimes some >> conditional code is required for stuff like keyboard accelerators (the >> "tk windowingsytem" command is useful for this), but again, it should >> Just Work. >> >> Or am I missing something? >> > > There's conventions for shortcuts and they vary by platform. For > example, home/end do different things on a mac vs on windows. > Scrollbars interact differently, and menu pulldowns operate > differently. To my knowledge, while Tile can replicate the *look* of > these things, it does not help with the interaction.
On Windows and Mac, Tk gets the menus correct by default (menu is at the top of the screen on the Mac, attached to a window on Windows). The Tk scrollbar is native on the Mac; the Tile scrollbar has problems. On Windows, the Tile scrollbar maps to Vista or XP or Win32, depending on Windows version. You need to correctly specify the command-accelerator in your code (on Windows it's the Control key, on the Mac it's Command), but assuming you do this, it works fine. I don't use "home" and "end" keys myself (I think these are more common on Windows than Mac) so I can't speak to that. Under Tk, keyboard navigation with the tab key generally works as expected on the Mac, and I assume so for Windows as well. The biggest drawback with Tk/Tile on the Mac is that even with Tile theming, it's still a bit outdated--Tile hooks into some older API's on the Mac that are more compatible with Tk; for instance, the notebook tabs look like Jaguar-era tabs (c. 2002). The Tile scrollbar is broken, but the Tk one works natively. Tile on Windows looks pretty darn good--I've played with the Windows Inspection Tool Kit, a well-designed Tcl/Tk application on Windows XP that uses Tile, and it's indistinguishable from something developed in VB or Delphi. (See http://magicsplat.com/wits/screenshot.html). Tile on the Mac requires a bit more hackery, but it's quite possible to get something looking nearly native (see http://www.codebykevin.com/portauthority.html). As for X, Tk and Tile are more of a mixed bag, because there is simply no single standard to target. Standard Tk looks and feels like Motif, as you know. Some of the Tile themes under X don't look much better. The most popular Tile theme on X is probably Clam, which looks more like a modern Gtk Clearlooks-style theme (see http://tktable.sourceforge.net/tile/screenshots/demo-clam-unix.png or http://www.codebykevin.com/pylocate-tile-x11.png). As far as I know, Tk/Tile offers reasonable defaults for X, unless you are looking for specfic integration with a particular environment (i.e. Gnome or KDE); in that case it's not as acceptable. > > Don't think I'm singling out Tk, Gtk has exactly the same problem - > you can make the buttons look native, but it doesn't adjust the > behavior. Tk does a better job with platform-specific defaults and behaviors than Gtk. When I read complaints about Tk on Windows, it's more on how ugly Tk is, not that its menus/keyboard behaviors don't work correctly. -- Kevin Walzer Code by Kevin http://www.codebykevin.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
